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The Supernatural 

Or 

Fellowship With God 



By the Same Author 

D. A. MURRAY, D. D. 

Christian Faith and the New 
Psychology 

Evolution and Recent Science as Aids to Faith 
8vo, cloth, net $1.50 

" Do evolution and modern psychology invalidate the 
supernatural element in Christian Faith ? That is a ques- 
tion that is giving many earnest minds much trouble these 
days, and it is the question that Dr. Murray essays to 
answer. His answer is, no ! On the contrary, he finds in 
the evolutionary interpretation of nature what he holds to 
be even firmer ground for belief in a personal Creator. 
An admirable piece of Christian apologetics." — Lutheran 
Observer. 

" Dr. Murray may be classed among the mediators be- 
tween modern thought and evangelical theology. Evolu- 
tion and the New Psychology are to him not sources of 
difficulty as a Christian thinker, but aids to faith. A most 
original and stimulating book." — The Continent. 

" An uncommonly strong book, full of meat and inspi- 
ration. The author has a brain and a pen." — Zion's 
Herald. 

"JThe cardinal points of the Christian religion are here 
treated from a purely scientific view-point. Not in recent 
years have we read anything so clear, from a scientific 
point of view, so satisfactory or so reassuring to Christian 
faith as this volume." — The United Presbyterian. 

" One of the most significant of the recent works in the 
field of Christian apologetics. ... In no other work 
have these ideas been brought together and elaborated 
with the scientific accuracy as in this book. It should be 
of great interest to the theologian, the scientific student 
and the modern reader." — Chicago Evening Post. 

Fleming H. Revell Company, 

Publishers 



The Supernatural 

Or 

Fellowship With God 



By 
DAVID A. MURRAY, D. D. 

Author of" Christian Faith and the New Psychology," etc. 




New York Chicago Toronto 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 



Copyright, 1917, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



3K 



IC 



\ I % 



M%z 




APR 14 1917 



New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
London : 2 ! Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 

©CLA-46-0303 



"X I 



To the memory of 
My Wife's Father 

Thomas Dove Foster 

Who while conducting a large business on Christian 
principles was also able, in public service, in 
municipal reform, in Society, in the Church, and in 
all his daily personal contact with men, to demon- 
strate that a close walk of Fellowship with God is 
the surest source of both Character and Social Service, 

This book is affectionately inscribed 



Preface 

DIFFERENT ages have had different religious 
problems. Once it was the question of Mono- 
theism. In the early Christian centuries it 
was the Person of Christ. At the Reformation it was 
the immediate access of the soul to God. To-day the 
great contest seems to be along the line of Naturalism. 

Science in the past century and a half has made 
enormous advances throughout the whole range of 
secular knowledge. It has demanded universal do- 
main. Religion has refused to be included on the same 
plane as other knowledge, and science has retaliated by 
either ignoring it or denying its validity. Especially 
have its supernatural postulates been most confidently 
challenged. 

What will be the outcome? Can religion again 
make good its ancient isolation in a world with which 
science has nothing to do ? Will science succeed in 
annihilating belief in the supernatural, and be able with- 
out it to build up in its own domain a satisfactory 
religion drawn entirely from natural sources ? 

Or will it be possible in some way to give religion, 
just as it is, with all its supernatural features intact, a 
recognized standing and established place in the world 
of scientific thought? Can it be coordinated in its 

7 



8 PKEFACE 

present form with all the rest of the discovered uni- 
verse facts in one unified consistent system ? 

It is confronting that situation that the following 
studies have taken up this most difficult question of the 
place of the supernatural in religion and in the universe 
scheme. 

D. A. M. 

Tsu y Ise, Japan. 



Contents 
Part I 

PROBLEMS 

I. The Book 15 

The Burden of the Supernatural. 

II. Definition . . . . . .21 

Reconciling Theories. 

Real Significance of the Supernatural in the 

Bible. 

III. The Point of View 35 

Character and Service. 

Embarrassing Results Arise. 

Eliminating the Supernatural. 

Legitimate Results of the Different View- Points. 

Is This the True Meaning of Religion ? 

Fellowship with God. 

Historical Meaning of the Term. 

The Meaning of the Bible Religion. 

IV. Social Service 58 

Fellowship a Higher Thing. 

Fellowship Stimulates Service, and Yet That is 

Not Its Main Purpose. 
Social Service is Fellowship, and Yet Fellowship 

Transcends It. 
Fellowship Demands Service, But it is Service 

for Fellowship's Sake. 
Mistaken Conceptions of Fellowship. 

V. Place of Religion in Evolution . . 68 

God's Relation to This World. 
What Was God's Purpose ? 
Fellowship is the Highest Kind of Satisfaction. 
Clear-Cut Concept of God. 
9 



10 CONTENTS 

Purpose of the Whole Evolution Process. 
The Evolution Process Foreshadows Fellowship 
by Men with God. 

VI. Value of the Supernatural . . .83 

Secondary Uses. 

Primary Motive of the Supernatural. 

Fellowship Must Consist of Just Such Acts. 

It is Fellowship for Fellowship's Sake. 

This Supernatural Regime the Basis of Religion. 

Silent Fellowship. 

Teaching Value of the Supernatural. 

An Illustration. 

Special Providence. 

Not Under Law but Grace. 

VII. Prayer ....... 105 

Prayer Implies the Supernatural. 

Answers to Prayer. 

Intercessory Prayer. 

Our Prayer Makes the Thing Possible for God. 

Immutability of Natural Law. 

Doing a Thing Asked for Becomes a Matter 

of Fellowship. 
Illustrations. 
LaWs of Prayer. 

VIII. Punishment 129 

Manufacture and Use. 
Punishment All Belongs to Natural Law. 
Punishment Only a By- Product in the Super- 
natural. 
Punishment by God. 

IX. Genesis of Christianity .... 142 

Ethics, Theology and Religion. 

Main Purpose of the Bible is Not to Reveal 

Knowledge. 
Genesis of Fellowship. 
Evolution Specializes. 
God a Typical Friend. 



CONTENTS 11 

Part II 
THE OLD TESTAMENT 

I. Purpose of the Bible . * . f 159 

A Biography. 

Nature of a Biography. 

II. Israel • 164 

Specialness a Necessity. 
Friendship of God. 

III. Abraham 172 

Beginning of the Era of Religion. 

How Will Fellowship Begin ? 

Tutelar Divinities. 

Two Separate Relations. 

Always as Friend, Not as Moral Ruler in the 
Supernatural Acts. 

Familiar Approachableness Rather Than Great- 
ness. 

IV. Moses .187 

Reason for Miracles at This Time. 

Beginning of the Movement. 

Using Natural Law. 

Personal Care. 

At Mount Sinai. 

Ruler or Friend ? 

Other Incidents. 

The Fundamental Question. 

V. Elijah 209 

All at Special Times. 
The Great Crisis. 
Restricted to a Special Group. 
Later Instances. 

VI. Prophecy 220 

Inspiration. 

The Supernatural Must be Evident in Order 

to be Justifiable. 
Didactic Writings. 
Credibility of Prophecy. 
Place in God's Plan. 



12 CONTENTS 

Conversation Begun at Sinai. 
Continuous Order of Prophets. 
Divine Revelation of Teaching. 
Personal Atmosphere. 
Severe Prophecies. 

VII. National History 241 

Bible Characters All Normal Men. 
Lessons from God's Dealings with Nations. 
Lessons from God's Dealings with Israel. 
Peculiar Attitude Towards Idolatry. 
Israel's Friend Rather Than the Moral Ruler 
of the World. 

VIII. God and Individuals . . . .255 

Nature of the Supernatural Punishments. 

Men of Low Social Level. 

Harsh and Cruel Men. 

God's Companionship with Good Men. 

Attitude Towards Bad Men. 

The Old Testament Gospel. 

Part III 
THE CHRIST 

I. The Incarnation ..... 277 

The Fact of the Incarnation. 

Possibility of the Incarnation. 

Purpose of the Incarnation. 

Its Place in the Evolution Scheme. 

Fellowship Always Specific and Limited. 

The Personality of Jesus. 

The Model Friend. 

Dislike for Publicity. 

Jesus' Miracles. 

The Miracles Proof of Jesus' Humanity. 

II. Atonement 302 

Love His Supreme Motive. 

Love Begets Suffering. 

Atonement. 

Love Produced His Death. 



PART I 
Problems 



I 

THE BOOK 

CHRISTIANITY has sometimes been called The 
Religion of a Book. While it is more than 
that, the designation is not entirely inappro- 
priate. A book, the Bible, has always had a supreme 
place in the Christian system and been considered the 
authoritative source of its teaching. The expression 
"To believe the Bible" has often, not inaptly, been 
used as the equivalent of being a Christian. 

The Bible is still the most widely read book of all 
literature, and recent years have seen a distinct revival 
in its study and esteem. Yet we cannot fail to notice 
a decided change in the nature of that esteem, and in 
the place it holds in men's hearts. 

A generation ago our fathers studied the book with 
reverence as "The Word of God," the food of the 
soul, " The only infallible rule of faith and practice." 
To-day, with all our reviving appreciation, we approach 
the Book with a critical reserve. It is to us a book of 
great value and absorbing interest. It has a most 
honoured place on the shelf of great ethical and literary 
classics. But all questions as to its authority or divinity 
we rather prefer not to have raised. 

Several causes have contributed to remove the old 
halo from the Book. The scientific spirit of the age, 

15 



16 THE SUPERNATURAL 

the work of the Higher Criticism, the study of Com- 
parative Religion, together with a natural reaction from 
a too mystical, if not mechanical, conception of its 
origin, have all had their influence. 

Another thing that has contributed much to this 
result is the fact that the attention of the Christian 
men of this generation is being so centered on Social 
Service that we do not feel nearly as much concern as 
our fathers did about distinctly divine things. 

Unquestionably this call of Social Service marks the 
highest level of ethical purpose the Church has yet 
attained. And yet life is so large, and its many parts 
so interdependent, that it is never safe to enshrine any 
one particular part as the whole and ignore all others. 
It might always be possible that there was a something 
else which was as necessary to this social activity as the 
root is to the flower, — something from which it draws 
its origin and without which it could not permanently 
exist. 

Still we cannot lightly regard any spontaneous and 
universal tendency. The survival of the fittest is the 
wise law of nature. If the Bible really is not entitled 
to the old place of supreme religious guide, if it has not 
the qualifications to satisfy the religious needs of men, 
and if it cannot prove its claim to divine authority, 
we will have to acquiesce and see it dethroned and 
superseded, no matter how painful it may be to tear up 
the roots of old affections and associations. 

But so much is at stake that before we finally rest in 
such a drastic change it will not be unreasonable to 
permit still another sympathetic examination, to see if 



THE BOOK 17 

possibly the fault may not lie, after all, in our misinter- 
pretations and misunderstandings, and if the old Book 
which has brought comfort and spiritual strength to so 
many generations of our fathers may not still, when 
rightly understood, continue to come to us as the voice 
of God pointing the way of Eternal Life. 

The Bukden of the Supernatural 
When we take up the Bible for study we are im- 
mediately met by the great question of the Supernatural. 
The whole message of the Bible, as it has come to us 
and as it has had such influence in the world, is a 
distinct assertion of the Supernatural. 

It is not merely that we find accounts of miracles in 
the Bible history. That is not an unusual feature in 
very old records. And it is not only that these miracles 
are so numerous and such a fundamental feature of the 
narratives that it has been found impossible to success- 
fully remove them without destroying all the meaning 
and value of the narratives themselves. It is more than 
that. The very essence of our religion is a relation to 
the unseen God which is distinctly supernatural. The 
central object of our religious trust is the Jesus Christ 
which the Book portrays, and that Christ, though 
there have been technical discussions as to His actual 
deity, has in the past always been considered by all 
Christians to be a supernatural person. And, more 
fundamental still, the very fact of any real revelation 
being made by God at all in any form or by any means 
is a distinctly supernatural matter, and so indeed is any 
real communication with Him in prayer or worship. 



18 THE SUPEKNATUKAL 

The whole trend of thought to-day, however, seems 
to be distinctly unfriendly to any suggestion of the 
supernatural. The scientific spirit of the times makes 
a peremptory challenge of everything that has any 
element of the supernatural in it. Such an exceedingly 
wide range of facts has been brought under the domain 
of explainable cause and effect that men are disposed to 
consider the thesis proved that everything belongs in 
that domain, and nothing is to be received as fact that 
cannot be so classified. 

Whatever our own belief or wish in the matter, we 
have to recognize that the popular feeling is strongly 
against the supernatural. Such an account is now no 
longer received on the same testimony that would sub- 
stantiate any ordinary event. It is even claimed by 
some that the one fact of an alleged event being super- 
natural is sufficient to invalidate any possible amount 
of testimony that could be brought to prove its occur- 
rence. 

But the Bible, as a historical phenomenon to be 
studied, is a book of the supernatural. The Bible 
which has had such a hold on men's minds, and which 
has had such enormous influence to lift up the world 
and make men and society better, has been the Bible 
accepted in the form we have it now, with its super- 
natural incidents and with the traditional estimate of 
its supernatural character. It is as a supernatural 
Bible, recording supernatural events, that it has had 
this power, and it is precisely the belief of its super- 
naturalness which has been the main thing that has 
given it this power and influence. 



THE BOOK 19 

Historically it has not been appreciation of the in- 
trinsic value of the teaching and of the high excellence 
of the ethical standards, which has given the Book its 
great power, so much as rather the firm belief that it 
is from God and that it gives us an immediate touch 
with God. It would be, to say the least, very disquiet- 
ing to our moral instincts to be compelled to believe that 
a falsehood and delusion had been the cause of such 
preeminent moral benefit and uplift in the world. 

As we examine the path of progress in the past we 
find that it has been by evolution rather than by revo- 
lution. We are prepared to expect evolution, expansion 
and clarification in our views as to God's personal rela- 
tions and communications to men, but it would be 
drastic revolution to have to believe that no revelations 
of any kind have ever occurred at all. 

Certainly, then, this question of the supernatural is a 
most pressing question and one that is vital in our whole 
religious situation. It is a question that will confront 
us all through our study of the Bible. For the super- 
natural is not merely an incident in the Bible and Chris- 
tian system. It is not merely a tint or auxiliary figure 
in the picture but it is the main subject of the picture 
itself. It is not something that can be easily expunged 
or explained away, for it is the distinctive texture of the 
Book and the fundamental basis of the whole system. 

Before making any direct study of the Bible text, 
then, it will be necessary to make a somewhat thorough 
inquiry into this whole question of the supernatural, 
both as to its place in religion and as to its possible re- 
lation to science and the whole world of evolution. 



20 THE SUPEKNATUKAL 

If we find that it is positively declared impossible by 
science, and especially if we find that it is not only un- 
necessary but incompatible with the interests of relig- 
ion, that must end the inquiry for us. 

But if we find, on the other hand, that science has 
really nothing positive to say against it, and that it is 
not only compatible with the highest interpretation of 
religion, but is a fundamental and indispensable postu- 
late of all religion, then that will not only open the 
way for a detailed study of the supernatural in the 
Bible, but will make that investigation and study a 
matter of absorbing interest and importance. 

The first matter, then, for us to consider is this prob- 
lem of the validity of the supernatural. Must every- 
thing supernatural in our religion and in the Bible be 
necessarily rejected as impossible of belief, and must 
our whole attitude and estimate be recast to fit that 
view, even though, — as inevitably it must, — it should 
reduce the Book to a rather questionable fiction and 
require an entire reconstruction of the grounds, and 
even the substance, of our religious belief ? 

Or, on the other hand, is it still reasonable to con- 
sider some or all of the supernatural in the Book as 
true? Can we reasonably receive the Book and the 
religion it teaches as containing in a literal and real 
sense a revelation of God ? May our Christian relig- 
ion, with its supernatural Book, its supernatural Christ 
and its supernatural salvation still be believed, and still 
continue to bring to us the same peace, strength and 
heart comfort as it has to our fathers for so many 
generations ? 



II 

DEFINITION 

WHAT do we mean by " The Supernatural " ? 
While the term is one in very familiar use 
there is more or less indefiniteness as to its 
precise meaning. It will be important to have a precise 
definition if we are to discuss the supernatural in the 
Bible. 

There are various definitions that merely look at the 
strangeness of the events alleged, or that treat them as 
though they were to be considered as events occurring 
without any adequate cause. We may pass all such 
definitions by as not pertinent to our inquiry. 

The most obvious definition is that which grows out 
of the etymology of the word. There is a range of 
events that are usually called natural events. Any- 
thing different from or outside of that range of events 
would be called " Supernatural." One objection to this 
is that it is a negative definition. A definition should 
be positive, describing a thing by what it is rather than 
by what it is not. 

Yery often the term is used to denote that an event 
was directly caused by God, in distinction from ordi- 
nary events that are caused by natural law. But, as 
Christians, we believe that all natural events are en- 
tirely the work of God just as truly as the supernatural. 
If however we recognize this and say that God provided 

21 



22 THE SUPERNATURAL 

for one great system of cause and effect which we call 
Natural Law, and any things that He does which are 
not included in that would be called Supernatural, it 
would be more nearly an adequate definition, but yet 
this too would be unsatisfactory in several respects. 

It is not easy or possible often to decide positively 
whether a given occurrence would come inside or out- 
side the working of natural law. Many things reported 
in the Bible that once would have been considered out- 
side of the province of natural law are now known to be 
easily producible entirely within the working of natural 
agencies. At one time all visions were considered to be 
certainly of that character. We now know that such 
phenomena can be produced altogether subjectively 
and by purely natural causes. 

All the wonderful events narrated as occurring in con- 
nection with the migration of the Israelites from Egypt 
to Canaan were once looked upon as the very types of 
the supernatural. We now consider that the crossing 
of the Eed Sea (Ex. 14 : 21 ff.) and of the Jordan (Josh. 
3 : 14-1 7), the fall of the walls of Jericho (Josh. 6 : 20), 
many of the plagues in Egypt (Ex. 7-10) and various 
other things, might possibly all have been produced by 
the normal working of natural agencies. And yet 
there are imperative reasons for putting these events 
into the same classification as all the other events to 
which the name Supernatural is applied. They are 
preeminently referred to in the after record as examples 
of God's special interposition and favour, and they 
could have no legitimate religious value or significance 
otherwise. 



DEFINITION 23 

Our definition of natural law is a very unstable and 
unsatisfactory one. Yery commonly it depends chiefly 
upon frequency and regularity of occurrence. Espe- 
cially is that true with those that hold that the effi- 
ciency behind all causation comes ultimately from God. 

For instance, we would say that it was a recognized 
part of natural law that Life can beget life. We say 
so because it is a familiar and frequent phenomenon. 
But suppose that in all history there had only been one 
single case where a parent had begotten offspring and 
life had begotten life. Or suppose we were consider- 
ing the very first of the long series of instances in 
which this has taken place, for everything must have 
a first instance. According to our assumed canons we 
must unquestionably consider that sole, or that first, 
instance an instance of the supernatural. 

Suppose on the other hand after a while it should 
come to be the regular and usual order of occurrence 
that after a man died, and his body entirely dissolved 
away, at the end of a short interval his soul should 
somehow construct for itself a new body, and he would 
go on living in the world again the same as before. 
Such a state of affairs is at least conceivable, and it is 
much more inherently probable even now than a few 
billion years ago it was that such a phenomenon as life 
should appear and one life be able to beget another. 
But if that were a thing that was constantly happening 
we would say just as unquestionably that Eesurrection 
was an ordinary feature of natural law. 

Now if all things act as they do because God has 
constituted them to do so, we can form no certain 



24 THE SUPERNATURAL 

prejudgment as to what order of things He may choose 
to make occur frequently in the future, and so, the first 
time any species of event occurs we have no way to 
judge whether it must be called a natural or a super- 
natural event. There is no intrinsic quality by which 
one event must be classified as natural and another as 
supernatural. Any division we make must be entirely 
dependent upon the lottery of our conjecture as to what 
God intends to do in the future. 

Keconciling Theokies 

With this in mind it might not unreasonably be 
claimed that all things that occur, whether in con- 
tinuous series or singly and unique, might be plausibly 
called Natural just because they are parts of the one 
prearranged plan and purpose of God. If any miracle 
did really occur at any time it therein became and was 
proved to be a part of natural law just as much as 
anything else is. God's purpose must be consistent, 
unified and perfectly articulated, whether we see it or 
not, and so one thing just as legitimate and necessary 
a part of it as any other, — the water changed to wine 
or five loaves multiplied by the word of Jesus just as 
much as the similar change consummated in the branches 
of the vine or stalks of wheat in the field, provided 
these things actually occurred. And so with a legiti- 
mate use of the word " Natural " we might classify 
everything of any kind that actually occurs as natural 
just because it does occur and is thereby shown to be a 
necessary part of the one universal prearranged plan. 

There is some disposition among a certain group of 



DEFINITION 25 

apologists to resolve all the miracles in the Bible along 
some such line as that and thus get rid of the burden 
of the supernatural entirely. In one sense this is quite 
plausible. It is quite possible to subsume all things 
that actually occur, even the most unusual, under the 
same category and demand that it be called natural 
law. For every kind of event there must have once 
been a first time that it occurred, when it too would 
have been unique and unusual. What better con- 
ception of Natural than to classify as such all that is 
contained in the one grand, consistent plan of God, 
whether the event in question occurs only once or 
occurs many millions of times ? In this way it would 
be possible to claim that the Bible miracles are not 
supernatural or interruptions of natural law at all. 

But this does not, unfortunately, remove any of the 
real difficulty after all. We have indeed gotten rid of 
the word " Supernatural " and are relieved of the stigma 
of an unwelcome term, but that is all, and the fact of 
specialness is there just as much as before. These so- 
called miracles must certainly have been produced by 
a different order of agencies or in a different way from 
that in which all ordinary events are produced. The 
use or non use of a word makes no difference. It is 
just as embarrassing to try to explain why God de- 
parted from the order of agencies which He had found 
suitable and sufficient in all the rest of the upward 
process and brought in special acts or special agencies, no 
matter whether we call all natural or whether we call 
one order of agencies natural and the other supernatural. 

It does not comport with our idea of God's calm, 



26 THE SUPERNATURAL 

competent consistency to suppose that He would work 
in that way. It is not the question whether God was 
concerned in one kind of agencies more than in the 
other, nor the question whether He could not if He 
chose change and use new agencies instead of the old 
agencies He had used to produce all other events. The 
question is, Would He do so ? What would be gained 
by this inconsistency and extra trouble ? Whatever 
difficulty there is it is just as great whether we call all 
natural or whether we call part natural and the rest 
supernatural. It is merely a change of name and no 
change in the fact of specialness. 

There is another way that some seek to escape the 
charge of supernaturalness. We know that many dis- 
eases can be healed by what is called mental healing, 
hypnotism and other similar ways. Science can now 
do easily many things that two thousand years ago 
would have been counted superlatively miraculous. It 
is a fair, logical extension to suppose that many things 
that we now would consider impossible or miraculous, 
science will be able to do as easily at some future 
time. 

If our science were only perfect every one of these 
wonderful events recorded in the Bible would be as 
easy to produce by any of us as it is now to produce 
hypnotic phenomena or send wireless telegrams. There 
was no interruption of natural law and no new agency 
used in those events, but merely through our ignorance 
we have not yet become familiar with and able to use 
the natural agencies, always in existence, which are 
adapted to produce those effects. 



DEFINITION 27 

While there is a certain measure of plausibility about 
this theory, and while it does not rid of the supernat- 
ural entirely, yet on the other hand it would really 
destroy the value of the Book and the incidents en- 
tirely, and be fatal to the whole cause. To say that 
the miracles of Christ and the apostles were of that 
character would be to say that they were merely works 
of magic. That is precisely what all magic is. In the 
occult, miraculous sense in which the term is commonly 
conceived, of course there is no such thing as magic. 
All real events that have been believed and classed as 
magic have been merely events produced in ways and 
by means that the spectators did not understand. 

In the early centuries there were quite a number of 
men, of whom Simon Magus is an example (Acts 
8 : 9-24), who did these magical acts, or acts which the 
spectators could not understand, and who made use of 
them to accredit some religious system which they 
taught. On this theory Christ and His apostles were 
on precisely the same level with these men, and not 
different from them in any respect. In both cases 
equally they used a system of deception to accredit a 
religious system. 

For it cannot be denied that it would have been de- 
ception. Down to the present day the whole Church 
has given decisive value to these alleged supernatural 
phenomena as proof that the Christian religion is of 
God. Moreover Christ Himself distinctly appealed to 
them as proof of that claim (Luke 7 : 20-23 ; John 
5 : 36 ; 10 : 25, etc.). This then would have been a case 
of the most serious kind of deception, and Christ the 



28 THE SUPEKNATUKAL 

most serious kind of a deceiver if, after all, His works 
were merely works of magic and not special divine acts. 

Keal Significance of the Supernatural in 
the Bible 

"We shall not here attempt to make use of any of 
these short cuts to a solution of the difficulty. ¥e 
shall fully assume that there are recorded in the Bible 
events that are special, and that are fundamentally dif- 
ferent from the ordinary events which we call Nature, 
— events that could not be produced by any causes now 
available to men or spontaneously in operation now. 
We shall, however, prefer not to define them by saying 
that they are not natural, or telling what they are not, 
but will try to find some positive characteristics by 
which we can define them. 

One thing, however, it will be very important to bear 
in mind, namely, that we are not here proposing to 
consider theoretically the whole abstract question of 
the supernatural in general, but are seeking to examine 
a very concrete, limited group of incidents recorded in 
one definite book, the Bible. It is only of that group 
of incidents that we are seeking to make a definition. 

If we examine the supernatural events recorded in 
the Bible we shall find that they are all events or acts 
produced by God personally for the specific benefit of 
some person or restricted group. A distinctive feature 
of all of them is their personal nature and restricted 
application. 

In the domain of nature God does acts, — or, what is 
the same thing, establishes laws and forces, — that are 



DEFINITION 29 

universal in their application. They affect everything 
everywhere that is suited to be affected by them. 
These acts are not so, but are done specifically to some 
one person or group alone. They all have that peculiar 
quality which in our relations with one another we call 
Personal, that is they appeal to the consciousness of the 
individual as acts intentionally designed for him spe- 
cifically. Of course the works of nature do not do so. 

All the other operations and agencies that God has 
instigated are continuous and permanent, operating in- 
variably whenever the given conditions are present. 
These acts do not have such universal automatic repe- 
tition, but are narrowed down and intentionally re- 
stricted to one specific case, and only at the one given 
time. They are no more truly acts of God than nat- 
ural acts are, but they are singular, personal and indi- 
vidual. That is their distinctive feature. 

To illustrate : — we say that it is the nature of fire to 
burn. If God made all materials, energies and laws, 
ordinary burning of fire is God acting. It always and 
invariably burns when the suitable material is in con- 
tact with it. That is nature. Now we could conceiv- 
ably imagine God some time so altering things by a 
special act that fire would no longer burn, or would not 
burn during a given period, and that could be called a 
supernatural act, perhaps, though there are no acts at 
all of that character or that class in this group of Bible 
incidents which we are examining. But again on the 
other hand we could conceive that some time when 
certain persons to whom God wished to show a per- 
sonal favour were thrown into the fire, God, in order 



30 THE SUPERNATURAL 

to save them from being burned, so restrained the 
forces which usualty operated that they were not 
burned. That would be more nearly a type of the 
miracles of the Bible. 

In one sense this latter would merely be a supernat- 
ural act like the previous one. But yet there is a pe- 
culiar personal quality about it which really makes it 
quite a different sort of thing, and warrants us in con- 
sidering all such cases in a class by themselves. As far 
as the mere matter of power is concerned, both cases 
equally imply the power of the Creator, — of the one 
who at first established nature. And both alike are 
interruptions of the invariable working of that first es- 
tablished nature. But when we come to consider the 
reasonableness of such acts, they are entirely different. 
Their meaning would be different, and the purposes for 
which they could conceivably be performed would be 
quite different. 

It is of this class of acts entirely that all the super- 
natural acts recorded in the Bible consist, — acts done 
personally for the sake of specific individuals. We 
may doubt whether there have ever been any of any 
other kind. But whether there have or not, this is the 
only kind that is recorded in this group that we are 
discussing, and so all our discussion of them may pro- 
ceed on that basis. We need only consider them as 
personal, restricted acts of God, in distinction from His 
universal and continuous acts which constitute nature. 

We might take for an instance the account of God 
carrying Elijah up by a chariot of fire to heaven 
(2 Kings 2 : 11). God constituted the law of gravita- 



DEFINITION 31 

tion in the beginning by which everything tends to 
fall downward towards the earth. Here we see the 
body of Elijah going upward instead of downward, 
contrary to that law. But that is not what the real 
meaning and value of the incident is. 

The real meaning is that God wished to personally 
perform an act of favour to the specific man Elijah, 
and did so irrespective of the fact that the process by 
which it was done held in abeyance or reversed the 
usual law of gravitation. It is the personal act of God 
to the specific individual which is the whole significance 
of the occurrence. The fact of its interfering or not 
interfering with a previous law of nature is entirely an 
incidental feature. 

Or, again, suppose that God had at some time spoken 
with an audible voice that somehow could be heard by 
all intelligent beings, outlining some very important 
new ethical rules, in order to improve the moral char- 
acter of the world. We certainly would call that a 
miracle, — a supernatural act in the usual definition of 
the term, and a very decided interposition into the 
course of nature. But it would not come within the 
class of occurrences that we have chosen to include in 
our definition, and of which we have said that all the 
supernatural in the Bible consists. We may express a 
decided doubt if there have ever been any supernatural 
acts of that character occurring anywhere, and if there 
have it certainly would be hard to reconcile them with 
the reasonable nature of all God's working. 

But it is a fact of an entirely different nature if we 
suppose God has a special interest in a certain group of 



32 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

individuals, and in order to make them feel His near- 
ness and interest in them personally, He speaks with 
an audible voice to them alone, words which they hear 
and recognize as coming from Him (Ex. 20 : 1-19 ; 
Deut. 5 : 4, 22). The fact is then of an entirely differ- 
ent nature and value, even though, as before, these 
words spoken consist of important moral rules. 

We are told that in our blood there are multitudes 
of little white cells that act almost like soldier guards, 
attacking and destroying harmful microbes and other 
injurious matter, and in this way they bring about re- 
covery from disease. Because this apparatus has all 
been produced naturally in the course of evolution we 
may call it God's plan for curing disease by natural 
law. Suppose, however, it had never been so produced 
naturally, but God had some time suddenly introduced 
all this apparatus by some kind of a special interposi- 
tion. Or suppose He should thus introduce some other 
universally operating apparatus to cure disease. We 
would properly call that a supernatural act in the com- 
mon definition, and moreover it would be an act that 
it would be most difficult to reconcile with the char- 
acter of a reasonable creator. 

But it is an entirely different kind of a matter if we 
suppose a divine man finds a sick mother in the home 
of His friend Peter, and as a personal act of friendship 
expels the disease from her system because she is His 
friend and He sympathizes with her (Mark 1 : 30). 

It is of this latter class of the supernatural that we 
will find all the supernatural events in the Bible to be 
composed, and it is this class to which we shall confine 



DEFINITION 33 

our definition, and concerning which we shall make our 
inquiry and discussion. 

"We may define the supernatural we find in the Bible 
then as follows : — The supernatural of the Bible consists 
of acts of God which were done to single individuals or 
groups, which were restricted to them and to the spe- 
cific occasion, and which were intended to impress them 
as personal acts of God definitely directed to them per- 
sonally. This is in contrast with God's impersonal, 
continuous, universal activities, which we call Nature. 

This definition will take in a few acts, like the 
plagues in Egypt and the crossing of the Eed Sea, 
which were produced by purely natural means, and yet 
ought properly to be included in the same class with 
all the rest of the special or supernatural events. But 
on the other hand there is no supernatural event re- 
corded in the Bible that would not be covered by that 
definition. 

Perhaps it would have been better if we had found 
some other term to use as a designation for these inci- 
dents in the Bible which we are considering, and left 
the word " Supernatural " to its etymological meaning. 
But that word is now in universal use as the designa- 
tion of these incidents, and no other good word seems 
to suggest itself for the purpose. Moreover we are dis- 
posed to assert on philosophical grounds, as we shall 
see later, that there are not, and cannot be, among 
God's activities in this world, any other supernatural 
acts aside from acts of this character, namely, personal 
acts, done with a personal motive to specific individuals 
or groups. That is the only kind of supernatural acts 



34 THE SUPEKNATUEAL 

it seems logical to suppose that God ever would do or 
has done. 

Keally then, in all these Bible incidents it is the re- 
striction of the act of God to the specific individual 
that is the chief feature that we shall find significant, 
or need consider. The fact that the act itself is inside 
or outside of the usual workings of nature is a detail 
that is comparatively incidental and unessential as far 
as its value in the Bible motive is concerned. Aside 
from the fact that it is calculated to impress on our 
feelings that the act is really an intentional act of God 
we may comparatively disregard that feature of special- 
ness or interruption of nature, provided only that we 
can find plausible justification for such acts occurring 
in a universe ruled by a perfect God. 



Ill 

THE POINT OF YIEW 

THE point of view is very important. Any one 
who has tried to use a kodak has had this im- 
pressed upon him. The houses, trees and 
other objects in the picture may be practically the 
same, but by moving his camera to a new location to 
bring another part of the landscape into the foreground 
and make another center to his picture, the effect pro- 
duced is entirely that of another scene. 

It is very important that we decide what the central 
purpose of our religion shall be considered to be. Es- 
pecially when we are considering whether the super- 
natural may properly have a place in our religion it is 
very necessary that we first accurately determine just 
what the fundamental essence and purpose of our re- 
ligion is. 

Up until a few generations ago there was no doubt in 
men's minds on that point. Eeligion was the means of 
Salvation. That was its central purpose. All men 
were doomed to eternal punishment on account of their 
sins, but by means of the offices of religion they could 
escape that punishment and have an eternal life of 
happiness in heaven. That was the purpose for which 
Christianity was established, and the great message 
which it brought to men. Jesus Christ came from 
heaven to earth expressly to die for us, that we might 

35 



36 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

be saved from death and have our sins forgiven. Of 
course there were many other things in the system, — 
privileges, duties, teaching and worship, — but the one 
central thing and the essential purpose was Salvation, — 
forgiveness of sins and the right to enter heaven. 

Character and Service 
Within the past few generations there has come to 
be a gradual change in the view-point. The old center 
has been shifted somewhat into the background, and a 
new center found about which popular theological 
thought is coming to arrange itself. The reality of 
blessedness and of punishments in the future life is 
still affirmed but it is made comparatively a secondary 
consideration. The real center which determines all 
the system is Character and Service. The object of 
religion is to build and purify character and to make 
men a more potent force in the uplifting of society. 

In this new view the old elements are still retained. 
There is a future life of happiness or of misery before 
men according as they have or have not accepted 
Christ. Christ came to enable men to enter a future 
life of happiness in "His Father's House." But that 
happiness of the future life will be the result of char- 
acter, — will consist of the purified and ennobled nature 
they have attained in this life by the help of Christ and 
His teaching and His Church. The real center of all 
the endeavour is made to be character, its great object 
the improvement and uplifting of both society and the 
individual. Knowledge of God, of course, has an im- 
portant place in this scheme of religion, for His will is 



THE POINT OF VIEW 37 

to be the law of our lives, as His character is to be their 
standard. 

In many respects this new view is felt to be a vast 
improvement over the old conception. It removes re- 
ligion entirely from the charge of sordid selfishness. 
It removes all appearance of arbitrariness and cruelty 
from God's judgments and punishments. It makes the 
whole matter seem much more reasonable and practical 
in this practical, utilitarian age, and makes it all an ap- 
propriate and integral part of the evolution scheme. 

Embarrassing Kesults Arise 
But a new difficulty has arisen in an unexpected 
quarter. As the religious movement has come to seem 
more and more practical and reasonable it has some way 
come to seem less necessarily and distinctively divine. 
To continue the figure ; — with the ethical motive brought 
so prominently into the foreground the supernatural 
has been crowded to the extreme background or blocked 
out of the picture entirely. 

In the first place, as the aim and meaning of religion 
came to be conceived so reasonable and natural, the 
scientific mind began to feel that perhaps religion 
might not be an antagonistic thing apart, but might 
after all be found to be a scientific fact, that might be 
studied and demonstrated by the scientific method, 
natural results traced to natural causes. 

It was found to have roots in Psychology, Ethics 
and Sociology, and to have developed in conformity 
with the evolution laws. So much was accounted for 
in that manner that it was assumed that in time it could 



38 THE SUPERNATURAL 

all be resolved into these purely natural elements, and 
there was no need for any divine factors or supernatural 
elements at alL In this way arose the comparative 
study of religions, with its natural corollary that Christi- 
anity, like all the other religions, was a natural product 
and composed of purely natural elements. 

In the second place, and more important, it was felt 
that the presence of any supernatural element in relig- 
ion was really a burden, as it was not only unnecessary 
and uncalled for, but would be a reflection on the 
competency of the evolution process. 

This has been especially felt by those who hold the 
evolution process to be simply the method of God's 
working. Theistic evolution has so enormously raised 
and expanded our idea of God that they find it difficult 
to conceive of His doing certain classes of acts that 
were formerly considered to be quite appropriate, and 
among these they include all the supernatural in 
religion. 

The marvellous intricacy and competence of the evo- 
lution process, interpreted as the work of God, has 
impressed us with God's infinite reasonableness and 
consistency, and made it impossible for us to believe 
His doing anything that would imply vacillation or 
incompetence. We cannot believe His doing anything 
so imperfectly that it would need to be later supple- 
mented to enable it to achieve fully its purpose. Nor 
can we believe that after He had established one process 
or one set of agencies quite competent to produce a 
result He would afterwards contrive other agencies for 
the express purpose of producing that same result, or of 



THE POINT OF VIEW 39 

producing it faster or better than the first process was 
capable of doing. 

"We cannot conceive, for instance, of His instituting 
a created system so imperfect that it required repeated 
subsequent tinkering to make it attain the form that 
He desired. We cannot conceive that He made ma- 
chinery of progress so wonderful and perfect that it 
produced a marvellous number and perfection of noble 
results in myriad fields, but in order to produce some 
certain few additional good results it required some 
wheels or appliances not originally provided for to be 
temporarily inserted. 

This objection to the supernatural is not merely the 
hacknied charge that a miracle is a violation of natural 
law. It does not apply merely to the individual cases 
of specific miracles. It reaches to the whole fact 
of revelation itself, the whole idea of "Kevealed 
Keligion," of God having in any way contributed 
anything aside from what is furnished naturally by 
natural law, to the religious and moral uplift of men. 

God originated in one compactly concatenated system 
a grand movement that has been able spontaneously, 
within its own characteristic working, to bring about 
myriad forms of progress and advancement in practi- 
cally every direction. It has lifted and developed a 
primordial germ of a single cell, through all the stages 
up and up to the high level of man, and then endowed 
that man with marvellous mental power and moral and 
social impulses. But just one little stage from a lower 
to a higher ethical level in man could not be brought 
about spontaneously by forces within that system, and 



40 THE SUPERNATURAL 

so God had to specially and outside of the system pre- 
pare and supply an appliance adapted to effect that 
particular step of the progress, — by divine revelation 
and supernatural interpositions. 

There are many natural causes that are operating 
to-day to improve men ethically and lead them to 
better moral conduct. These causes have produced 
many noble qualities and beneficent advances in 
countries where no teaching of our revealed religion 
has reached. But these already provided causes were 
not producing the desired results fast enough or thor- 
oughly enough and God had to specially prepare and 
introduce other, not originally provided, appliances to 
produce the results more rapidly and more thoroughly. 
To say this would be to entirely belittle the ability of 
the Creator and of His first great act of creation. 

Again, for the same reason we cannot conceive that 
God would give a special divine revelation of knowl- 
edge merely because men needed that knowledge faster 
than they were getting it, or needed higher teaching 
than they were attaining to unaided. God has in His 
first great creation system made so much knowledge 
and such high grades of knowledge spontaneously 
available to man, that it is inconceivable that He could 
not and would not, if He had so desired, have made all 
necessary or profitable knowledge sufficiently available 
without the necessity for any after additions. 

We cannot believe it possible, therefore, that God 
should find it necessary to make any sort of special, 
occasional interposition or revelation merely to supply 
some help, teaching or moral uplift that became desir- 



THE POINT OF VIEW 41 

able but which men could not otherwise have attained. 
If then in the Bible we find accounts of supernatural 
facts occurring for that purpose, or if we are told that 
the Bible is itself a supernatural revelation given for 
that purpose, we find it at least a great strain on our 
credulity to try to believe those facts or to accept the 
Book on that basis, and our esteem for the Bible is 
thereby seriously weakened. 

Eliminating the Supernatural 
And so the task has been resolutely undertaken of 
eliminating the supernatural from the Bible. It was 
not undertaken in a spirit of hostility to either Chris- 
tianity or the Bible, but rather the reverse. It was 
honestly felt that the supernatural elements were an 
incumbrance, that they were a hindrance to the accept- 
ance of Christianity by the modern mind, that the 
scientific mind felt compelled to reject any system which 
had in it so much of that which it considered illogical 
and unbelievable, and so, in spite of its manifest supe- 
riority and power in so many other respects, it was 
rejecting the Christian religion on that account. 

It was felt that if this objectionable feature could 
only be eliminated, Christianity, with its enormous 
power for good, would be more widely accepted by the 
modern mind. If some theory of interpretation could 
be devised for the Bible, to set aside all the super- 
natural and miraculous features while retaining the 
ethical teaching and inspiring power, the usefulness of 
that great historic clas? ic might be greatly prolonged. 
Naturally the elimination of the supernatural must 



42 THE SUPEBNATUKAL 

involve a rejection of the Divinity of Christ. This 
position has been consistently accepted by many. 
With many others the heart if not the mind insisted 
that the divinity of the Christ was too precious and too 
fundamental to be given up without destroying the 
whole system. And so they have made a brave at- 
tempt to retain that divinity as a fact while rejecting 
all the appropriate product of it both in the acts of 
Christ and in the propagation of His religion. 

But by the great body of Christians this attempt 
has been felt to have been unsuccessful. The divine 
eliminated from the character of Christ or from His 
work and actions, would so mutilate the record as to 
make it meaningless. Moreover the person and the 
religion of Jesus have had too great influence in the 
world to be accounted for by any naturalistic hypothesis 
thus far devised. The New Testament, with all its 
supernatural features, is too well authenticated by 
abundant historical evidence to be successfully set aside 
or reconstructed. The attitude of a large part, if not 
the majority, of even critical thought at present is that 
the New Testament, with all its difficulties and con- 
tradiction of modern scientific tenets must still be ac- 
cepted as a fairly accurate witness, and things did take 
place, for the most part, substantially as it records them. 

But with the Old Testament it is different. The 
things it recounts lie largely outside the field of 
accurate historical examination. Its religion and teach- 
ing also are conceived to be superseded by the higher 
teaching and religion of the New Testament (in 
spite of Jesus' emphatic statement to the contrary), 



THE POINT OF VIEW 43 

(Matt. 5 : 18). Here, thus, there seemed to be no 
obstacle to yielding a full consent to the scientific 
demands. Perhaps not consciously but none the less 
really a large section of recent, popular religious 
thought has settled down to the compromise of giving 
up the Old Testament entirely as a book of religious 
authority, and being content with a more or less fully 
accredited New Testament. And even in that New 
Testament, the supernatural features which were once 
esteemed the things of chief importance are now felt 
to be almost entirely without value if not indeed a 
positive burden. 

Such then is the situation to-day, and the cause that 
has brought it about. Such is the question we are now 
confronting. Are we willing to contentedly acquiesce 
in this state as final, or do we still retain the hope that 
it may be only a temporary wave, and the old faith 
may again be found possible ? May we still hope that 
something will yet be found that will justify the super- 
natural, and the Bible be again restored to its old place, 
our New Testament and divine Christ be again fear- 
lessly believed without any apologies to scientific 
thought, and our Old Testament too be found a rich 
treasure of divine inspiration and life, — the whole Book 
alike be considered worthy the old title of " A Eevela- 
tion " and " The Word of God " ? 

Legitimate Eesults of the Diffekent 
Yiew-Points 
This process has all been perfectly logical and the 
respective conclusions quite legitimate. Both the old 



44 THE SUPEKNATUKAL 

view and the new were quite consistent and reasonable 
from their respective view-points. God is reasonable 
and consistent, and will never start a new process to 
accomplish something that He has already established 
another process to effect. Still, of course, if He has 
two distinct enterprises with different purposes He 
may be expected to freely employ in the second enter- 
prise other agencies than those employed in the first, 
and so we might freely have these events which we 
call supernatural. 

The old view considered that God did have such a 
second and entirely distinct enterprise, which had no 
connection with what we call Nature. It considered 
that what we call Keligion or " Grace " was a matter 
that lay entirely outside the domain of nature. Nature 
has to do with this world. Eeligion has to do or is re- 
lated entirely with heaven, where the conditions and 
laws of this world do not apply. 

Eeligion was considered as an enterprise wherein 
God from without undertook to deliver man out of a 
situation of ruin into which he had gotten himself in 
this world, and to prepare him for entering a new life 
in an entirely new world separate and distinct from 
this. Of course from that view-point there would not 
be any impropriety in God doing whatever He pleased 
to accomplish that end, and it could be no reflection on 
the adequacy of the work which He had done in nature 
since that was a distinct enterprise entirely. 

From that point of view any amount of miracles and 
special interpositions would be perfectly reasonable. 
Indeed we would surely expect that there would be 



THE POINT OF VIEW 45 

some activities in that enterprise that would be differ- 
ent from those that obtain in ordinary nature. So the 
old belief in the supernatural was entirely consistent 
from its view-point. 

But from the modern view-point religion is not thus 
something entirely outside of the domain of nature. 
It has come to seem unreasonable to modern thought 
that God should have two such enterprises entirely 
separate and distinct, both concerned with men. 
Moreover it makes religion itself seem to be only a 
kind of " Kepair Shop," a confession of failure in the 
first enterprise that had to be remedied by bringing in 
an entirely new and separate one. It has come to 
seem imperative that we should make religion an 
integral part and culmination of the one great enter- 
prise that has been in progress all through the ages, 
and which we call Nature. 

And so the new point of view conceives, as we have 
seen, the main purpose of religion to be character. 
There is individual character which consists of right- 
eousness and goodness in the individual, and collective 
character which results from the work of religious men 
righting the wrongs and uplifting the condition of 
society. All this attempted under the help and direc- 
tion of God is what constitutes that noble thing which 
we call religion. 

This certainly is an integral part of the evolu- 
tion system. While it implies incompleteness in the 
present state of affairs, and that "Perishing of 
the Unfit" which characterizes all the evolution pro* 
gram, yet it does not make any implication of fail- 



46 THE SUPEBNATUKAL 

ure or of new interpositions to remedy an unsuccessful 
work. 

Keligion is thus in the fullest degree a part of the 
evolution process, for it is but carrying on to comple- 
tion that which it is the work of the whole process to 
effect. That whole process is a process of elevating 
and producing things of higher and higher moral 
worth. This is but the highest and noblest part of 
that one great enterprise of character building. 

Here is a long process by which God is developing 
that noble thing — Christian Character. The natural 
agencies which He made provision for in the one great 
original act of creation were sufficient to almost ac^ 
complish the result. They were able to take the 
Amoeba of one cell and elevate it on up and up to the 
level of man, and still on up to the moral level of a 
Socrates or a Confucius, but to go one step farther and 
elevate that Socrates or Confucius up to the moral 
level of the average Christian man was beyond the 
power of those provided agencies and necessitated this 
supplemental and supernatural divine activity. 

Suppose a man was clever enough to contrive a 
machine to manufacture screws. The machine would 
draw out the steel wire, cut it to the proper length, 
taper one end to a point, cut the thread, roughly form 
up the head and cut a slit in it, but at that stage it 
could do no more, and he would have to take the screw 
out of the machine and smooth and polish up the head 
by hand. We would say that an inventor who could 
go so far could probably go just a little farther, and 
perfect his machine so it would finish the whole proc- 



THE POINT OF VIEW 47 

ess. Certainly we would say that his invention, won- 
derful as it was, still was short of perfection if it could 
not supply that last little detail also. 

Just that is what we are asked to believe concerning 
God's work, if the essential object of religion is to im- 
prove character, and if it required this expenditure of 
special divine activity and special divine teaching in 
order to produce this final detail of Christian character. 
"We cannot wonder at thoughtful men wishing that the 
supernatural could be entirely eliminated from our 
Bible and from our Christian system. 

Is This the Tkue Meaning of Keligion ? 

But what if that is not after all the true meaning 
and purpose of religion ? There is a story that a cer- 
tain Chinese statesman was once watching some college 
youths playing a game of lawn tennis. As he watched 
them running and straining to knock the little ball 
backward and forward over the net he remarked to 
his companion : 

"It is strange, when the Americans are so clever at 
invention, that they have not been able to devise a ma- 
chine to perform that operation for them." 

Well, though it would have required a rather large 
and intricate machine, yet if the only purpose of it all 
was to secure that a certain rubber sphere should be 
propelled a certain number of times over a net, very 
probably American invention would not have found it 
an impossible feat to construct a machine that would 
perform that operation. And if the forming of high 
and pure character was the only purpose, or the con- 



48 THE SUPEESTATUEAL 

trolling purpose God had in mind in religion, doubtless 
He would have been quite able to have arranged for 
the machinery of the evolution process to produce that 
work adequately, without the supplement of these su- 
pernatural accessories. 

It is doubtless rather venturesome to dare to suggest 
that character and service are not the chief objects of 
religion and the highest purpose in life. It is so re- 
cently that we have left the lower conception that re- 
ligion is merely a means of escaping hell and attaining 
heaven, that the early exhilaration of the higher mo- 
tive is still upon us. The conception of character build- 
ing and social service as the supreme motive has thrilled 
and captivated us. It seems such a high, unselfish and 
worthy motive in every way. And certainly it is a 
noble conception. Even if some other object may 
prove itself to be the higher and ultimate object of re- 
ligion, we may be sure it will not discredit the impor- 
tance of character. Though something else may be 
brought to occupy the foreground of the picture we 
may be sure that character and service will still be in 
the view and in a very prominent position. 

But we must venture to claim that the development 
of character is not the chief and ultimate object of our 
Christian religion. Our Christian religion is irrevo- 
cably committed to the supernatural, and a supernatural 
propaganda, as we have seen, could not take that for 
its fundamental purpose without discrediting the com- 
petence of God's work in creation. 

Moreover the Bible itself does not represent that to 
be the essence of religion. True, the word Eeligion 



THE POINT OF VIEW 49 

has various meanings and is sometimes used in that 
sense, or the name religion is given to that one of its 
products (cf. James 1 : 27). For it is true that our 
Christian religion has more influence to produce noble 
character and philanthropic service than any other 
known agency, and it was intended that it should do 
so. It is perfectly right that we should use it as an 
effective instrument to gain a higher manhood and 
make the world better. But that does not prove that 
that is its central and ultimate purpose. Every effect 
of an act is not necessarily to be counted as the formal 
purpose for which it was performed. 

What then is the fundamental meaning of our Chris- 
tian religion ? What purpose is there that we may set 
down as its real, formal object, a purpose which is of 
such a nature as to justify supernatural events taking 
place in order to secure its accomplishment ? 

Jesus Himself has given us a definition. It was just 
before the end, at the Last Supper. He had been hav- 
ing that farewell talk with His disciples, and turns for 
a few moments of communion with the Father who 
had sent Him. In the opening words of that prayer 
(John 17 : 1-3) He states that His great purpose in 
coming into the world was to give Eternal Life to men. 
And then He defines what that Eternal Life is : " This 
is Eternal Life, that they should know thee the only 
true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus 
Christ." 

The great mission which Jesus Christ came into the 
world to accomplish was to enable men to know God. 
That to Him was the supreme thing, that the essence 



50 THE SUPERNATURAL 

of religion. To know a person is to be on terms of ac- 
quaintance with him. It means social intimacy, friend- 
ship and personal fellowship. Must we not then put 
that down as the meaning and ultimate purpose of re- 
ligion, namely, to come into a condition of fellowship 
with God ? 

Fellowship With God 

We will venture to define, then, that the supreme 
purpose and fundamental meaning of our religion is 
this which Jesus made possible by His coming, namely, 
fellowship with God. It is not merely a cold, imper- 
sonal scheme for developing character, — a sort of final 
finishing and polishing department in the great evolu- 
tion factory. Much less is it merely a device to escape 
hell and get into heaven, — a sort of great Eescue 
Home or Repair Shop. There may be need enough 
for all these in this complex, battle-scarred old world 
of ours. But any object of sufficient moment to war- 
rant the incarnation of the Supreme Being Himself and 
His visible residence for a while among created men, 
must certainly be something on a higher level than any 
of these. 

Religion is fellowship with God. This is a definition 
that puts it in the very highest category possible. It 
makes it a thing quite worthy of having the greatest 
acts done on its account. The reason, perhaps, why it 
does not usually impress us more is because it has be- 
come so familiar. Our very idea of God has come to 
be built around it. God's efforts in that direction have 
succeeded so well that we in modern times have thor- 



THE POINT OF VIEW 51 

oughly gained this feeling of His approachableness. 
We have become impressed with His humanness, — as 
indeed He intended we should be,— but at the expense 
of His Infinite Majesty. 

But if we will just try to think what is implied in 
the thought of friendship, intercourse and association 
with such a being as we have now come to know the 
Creator God is, what vistas of future promise it opens 
up as well as what ennobling and purifying of present 
life it entails, we will realize that it is truly the highest 
definition we could give, that it presents a motive well 
worthy of all that religion has claimed to do and be in 
the world, and as we shall see later, a motive for which 
it would be plausible to expect God to do some things 
that He had not done in carrying out the processes of 
ordinary nature. 

We need hardly add that accepting this view means 
no possible slacking of zeal for Social Service, but on 
the contrary must result in the greatest help and stimu- 
lus for such service ; as we shall more fully see later. 

Histokical Meaning of the Term 
That this is really the true conception of religion will 
be readily apparent. Some form of worship or relation 
to some kind of gods has always been the kind of cult 
to which the name Keligion has normally been applied. 
It is only in very recent years, and under the pressure 
of materialistic or naturalistic theories that the attempt 
has been made to give anything else except relations 
with God or the gods the name of religion. 
When we consider the subject of religion as a world 



52 THE SUPERNATURAL 

phenomenon and as one of the elements of the world's 
life, some form of worship or some attitude towards some 
kind of gods or superior beings is always considered the 
essential feature. That has practically been the ac- 
cepted definition of religion. If it could be shown that 
any given tribe made no attempt towards any worship 
or service of any kind towards any superior spirits or 
beings it would be thereby counted that they had no 
religion. 

Ethics and religion are two distinct movements, and 
have had entirely distinct and separate genesis. The 
beginning of ethical discipline must have very far ante- 
dated the rise of religion, for we see the rudiments of 
it already in some of the higher animals. Keligion is 
not an outgrowth or product of this ethical discipline. 
It is something separate entirely, and with a different 
origin. And it is not till we reach a comparatively 
late and high form of religion that any considerable 
amalgamation of ethics and religion is attempted and 
the authority of the gods put forth as the sanction for 
moral conduct. 

Historically considered, then, and as a phenomenon 
of world life, what has been called religion has always 
been some sort of attitude towards gods or supernatural 
beings. It is the relation with divine or supernatural 
beings that constitutes it religion. 

The Meaning of the Bible Keligion 
If this is the meaning of the term when applied to 
the ethnic religions, much more is it so when applied to 
Christianity and the Bible religion. Though ethics is 



THE POINT OF VIEW 53 

made more prominent there, and the ethical standards 
put much higher than in any of the ethnic religions, 
yet the relation with God is also made very much 
more intimate and absolute. It is put, also, upon a 
very much more sympathetic and familiar footing. To 
those complying with the conditions that relation is 
always made one of favour and protection, of confiding 
and real intimate fellowship. So intimate and sympa- 
thetic is it that the relation of children to a father is 
the term by which it is typically expressed. 

Certainly since the coming of Christ the fundamental 
essence of the Christian religion has been communion 
and fellowship with God. That is the religion of the 
New Testament and the religion which Christ both 
taught and practiced. And as we shall see later, it is 
equally so of the Old Testament as well. 

The evidence that this is so lies not so much in spe- 
cific proof texts, though there are plenty of them (John 
6 : 29 ; 15 : 15 ; 1 Cor. 1 : 9 ; 1 John 1 : 3, etc., etc.), as in 
the whole tenor of the teaching and the very nature of 
the system itself. 

From first to last it is a personal relation to God that 
is urged and invited. Salvation is represented as recon- 
ciliation to God, bringing the prodigal back again to 
his father's house. The Christian life is always repre- 
sented as serving God, walking with God, enjoying the 
favour and presence of God. Even sin is often rated 
not from its ethical badness nor its desert of punish- 
ment but from the fact that it separates us from God. 
Man's better character and conduct are represented as 
the result of a close relation with God rather than the 



54 THE SUPERNATURAL 

relation with God a result of the better conduct and 
character. 

The purpose of the Bible is not theoretical but prac- 
tical, and as the consequences of that new relation are 
so enormous to us, delivering us from eternal ruin and 
bringing to us an eternity of happiness, it is not strange 
that the consideration of those results bulks large in 
the teaching. It is not strange that Paul, writing to 
the Romans, a people where the authority of law was 
so prominently in the foreground, should make much 
of the point of " Justification by Faith." And yet, 
writing to other communities of a more contemplative 
turn he merely goes a little farther and shows that 
even this justification is for the purpose of bringing 
us back to God that in the ages to come He might 
lavish upon us the wealth of His loving fellowship 
(Eph. 2 : 1). Even to the Komans the justification is 
not an end but a means to a closer relation with God 
(Rom. 5 : 1). 

The one thing which the New Testament always 
lays stress upon as the condition of salvation and basis 
of religious life is Faith, and this faith is practically 
almost another name for fellowship. It is true that 
this faith was once supposed to be merely the belief of 
various doctrines, and it seems to be so defined in some 
of the ancient creeds. But we now recognize that the 
"Faith " intended is something far more than that. It 
is not mere intellectual belief but a personal connection 
between the soul and God. It is a matter of trust and 
felt personal relation with a sympathetic God. Such 
faith is really one element of fellowship and certainly 



THE POINT OF VIEW 55 

implies the existence of this which we have called 
" Fellowship with God." It is the attitude of the soul 
that looks for and desires fellowship, and the attitude 
that makes fellowship possible. 

The most conclusive consideration of all is Prayer. 
Prayer is an essential and fundamental feature in all 
religions everywhere, and certainly it has always been 
considered so in the Christian religion. The very es- 
sence of Christian prayer is communion and fellowship 
with God. We might almost say prayer is fellowship 
and that only, for really the things granted in answer 
to prayer are not the purpose for which prayer was in- 
stituted. The purpose for which prayer was designed 
by God was the fellowship of the prayer itself, and that 
is the main object. The things granted are merely a 
means to induce men to come and engage in the fellow- 
ship. Certainly prayer is fellowship, and prayer is the 
very essence of our religion. 

Even heaven, the goal of religious hope, is presented 
to us as a matter of fellowship with God (John 14 : 3 ; 
Phil. 1 : 23, etc.). True, our materialistic imaginations 
have filled in the details with all kinds of materialistic 
and sensuous apparatus of pleasure, but the actual teach- 
ing of the Bible presents it chiefly as going to be with 
God in the glory of His presence, — as " Being at home 
with the Lord " (2 Cor. 5 : 8). 

The whole practice of the Christian life, the condition 
of entrance to it and the heaven to which it looks for- 
ward all consist essentially of some phase of fellowship 
with God. If we wish to define the place of our 
religion among the facts and forces of the world we are 



56 THE SUPEKNATUKAL 

right in taking that as the term that really defines it. 
That is its value, and that is the place we must assign 
it in the great scheme of God's unfolding evolution. 
Christianity is " Fellowship with God." 

It may be asked : What is new in that ? Christians 
have always recoguized that they have fellowship with 
God, and that it is a most blessed privilege. With 
many of the mystics it has bulked large, filling all the 
horizon of their deepest experiences. Even those who 
make most of social service and development of char- 
acter do not necessarily lose sight of this other fact of 
fellowship with God, and may consider it a very im- 
portant source of strength and comfort- 
Precisely so. Our hearts have often judged more 
truly than our intellects. It is true we have always 
recognized that it is a factor, but we have not always 
put it in its proper place as the very center of the 
picture. It is not a question of the greatness of the 
benefit to us, nor a question of what we should spend 
most time and zeal upon, but a question of what is 
really the central and governing fact. The mountain 
may bulk larger in a picture than the deer in the fore- 
ground, nevertheless the picture is a picture of a deer 
and not a picture of the mountain, and is to be so 
judged. 

Yery possibly it is not the contemplation of this 
fellowship, but works of active social service and self- 
culture that ought to occupy the larger part of our 
time and interest. It is true that the deliverance from 
ruin and promise of eternal happiness do naturally 
make the stronger pull upon our feelings and will 



THE POINT OF VIEW 57 

furnish the stronger motive to induce men to enter the 
religious life. They will, and ought to be, for a long 
while yet, perhaps, the main staple of evangelistic 
preaching. And yet not these but fellowship with God 
is the central fact, the ultimate purpose and what we 
must define the real essence of religion to be. 

Now if the essence of religion is fellowship with 
God we shall see as we proceed that not only would it 
not be a violation of nature and a burden to the cause 
of Christianity for such things as these supernatural 
incidents in the Bible to occur, but they are really 
normal and necessary. Indeed religion could not arise 
and exist without the occurrence or at least the belief 
of some such acts. 



IV 
SOCIAL SEKVICE 

IT will not be surprising if some are not disposed ta 
greet very enthusiastically the demand that we 
must substitute " Fellowship with God " as the 
essential aim of religion in place of the cultivation of 
Character and Social Service. What ! Are we to go 
back to the middle age conception ! Are we to en- 
courage people to live in cells and cloisters and spend 
their time in rapt meditation, — and leave the world to 
groan and rot ! 

Not at all. These great philanthropic and sociological 
enterprises are the glory of our awakened Christian 
life. They are themselves part of the fellowship 
(Matt. 25 : 40 ff.). They are preeminently the mission, 
as they should be the passion, of every Christian man. 
They may well be said to gauge the genuineness of any 
man's religion in these days. 

But that does not mean that religion itself may not 
contain something else than these, noble as they are. 
Even admitting that they ought to be the supreme 
absorbing employment of every friend of God, that 
does not prove that the friendship itself, and the per- 
sonal fellowship and communion, are not something to 
be considered and are not something higher and nobler 
even than this Service and this Character. 

58 



SOCIAL SERVICE 59 

Social Seevice Ouk Chief Work but Fellow- 
ship a Higher Thing 

Unquestionably these great civic, ethic and sociolog- 
ical movements mark the highest standard to which 
Christian living has yet attained. The more religious 
a man is to-day the more completely he will absorb his 
life and energies in forwarding these noble ends, and the 
more completely he ought to do so. But that does not 
prove that there may not be something else intrinsically 
higher than all these, and that higher something the 
thing to which we ought properly to give the name 
Keligion. 

If a man is a groceryman or in some other business 
he ought to give his most earnest thought and energy 
to that business. The one great purpose and effort of 
his life will be to sell as many groceries as possible 
and do a large and successful business. During the 
larger part of his waking hours his thoughts and efforts 
will be strenuously engaged in that one enterprise. 
But that does not say that he does not prize his home 
with its personal fellowship with wife and children, 
and that he may not consider that personal relationship 
and fellowship a thing far higher than his selling 
groceries. 

The fellowship does not interfere with his selling 
groceries. It does not even compete with it. The 
more he loves his wife and children, and the more he 
prizes their fellowship, the more he will strive to make 
his business successful. That home fellowship is some- 
thing different from and on a higher plane entirely than 
the selling groceries. 



60 THE SUPEKNATUKAL 

Just so, our fellowship with God is a something on a 
higher plane than even our caring for the sick and 
revising factory laws. It is not to be questioned which 
should be given more prominence or more time, any- 
more than in the other case the man questions to which 
he shall give the more prominence or more time, selling 
groceries or loving his family. The two are not com- 
petitors in any sense. So these two also are not con- 
petitors whose relative importance is to be calculated 
and balanced. The love and fellowship with God is a 
something on a higher plane and in a separate category 
entirely. 

Fellowship Stimulates Service, and Yet That 
is Not Its Main Purpose 

We may say truly that the more a man loves and 
has fellowship with God the more earnestly he will 
devote his life to these noble practical aims, just as we 
have said that the more a man loves his wife and chil- 
dren the more he will feel impelled to try to be success- 
ful in business. No man can say that urging an increased 
spirit of fellowship and communion with God is likely 
to draw off interest from the sociological and ethical 
work. On the contrary, there is nothing that has so 
much influence in rousing and intensifying passion for 
that work as a real fellowship with God. If one is 
anxious to see this sociological work carried on vigor- 
ously there is nothing else that will so much forward it 
as to have men come into warm and constant personal 
fellowship with God. 

And yet, on the other hand, we must repudiate 



SOCIAL SEBVICE 61 

strongly the idea that this fellowship with God is 
primarily for the sake of the social service, that it is to 
be considered but a means to produce that service, that 
that is its main use and it is to be esteemed and encour- 
aged primarily for that reason. He would not have a 
very high idea of life who would say that since the 
more a man loves his wife and children the more ear- 
nestly he will try to be successful in his grocery busi- 
ness, therefore family affection ought to be urged and 
encouraged for the sake of the grocery trade. 

Social Seevice is Fellowship, and Yet Fel- 
lowship Teanscestds It 

We have not, however, given an entirely fair illus- 
tration. For this service of morals and sociology is not 
an enterprise separate and apart. It is fellowship. It 
is really itself a high form of fellowship, for it is work- 
ing side by side with God in the same work with Him. 
This social work is God's own great enterprise, and the 
very matter of working at it is engaging with Him in 
the same work in which He is engaged, and that is 
fellowship. This sociological work itself can really all 
be included under the one term as part of that great 
something which we call fellowship with God. 

And still, though social service may be truly fellow- 
ship with God yet we must not forget that fellowship 
far transcends this service. The service is only one 
part or one feature of the fellowship. 

A man comes home and helps his wife beat the car- 
pets and clean the windows, and that very work is a 
form of fellowship with her. But home fellowship and 



62 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

family life is something more than house-cleaning. It 
is a higher concept entirely, however necessary the 
house-cleaning may be. 

Moreover, houses were not made only for cleaning. 
Though some men may be inclined to think otherwise 
when the spring house-cleaning drags on day after 
day, yet it is normally to be expected that some time 
it will be finished, and only the daily dusting and 
tidying will be sufficient for the needs of comfortable 
living. 

So this moral renovating and cleaning of the house 
social and civic, though it does seem to be a long and 
tedious process, yet we cannot believe to be necessarily 
a permanent part of the world's program and always 
a major feature of the meaning of right life. As truly 
as that work is efficiently done it must more and more 
tend to become unnecessary. There ought to come a 
time when it will no longer be a main feature of human 
duty. The house will be cleaned. 

That happy time may not be for a hundred years 
yet, or even for many hundred years. Yet even so, 
who can say that in the whole long range of coming 
human history our present age, when social service is 
the most pressing duty, may not be comparatively but 
like one short house-cleaning week. In the Bible 
teaching there are passages that are usually interpreted 
to indicate that there is such a prospect in the future, 
extending out to a far horizon, during which the world 
is to be a scene of happy " Millennial " purity. Will 
there be nothing to constitute religion then because 
there is no more house-cleaning to be done ? 



SOCIAL SEEVICE 63 

Fellowship Demands Service, But it is Service 
for Fellowship's Sake 

Now, in this house-cleaning age, we must recognize 
that house-cleaning is the one supremely important 
thing to be done. Let us not slacken our efforts or 
interest in any respect, but rather increase them. Nor 
must it be any disparagement of this civic and socio- 
logical work to say that there is another category on a 
distinctly higher plane, and the real essence of religion 
is this fellowship with God. To exalt that fellowship 
is no incentive or excuse to neglect the social service, 
but quite the reverse. For under present circum- 
stances fellowship with God can only be counted to 
subsist where there is an interest in that sociological 
work, for there is where God and His interest are at 
present. A man can hardly claim to be on terms of 
very devoted love and fellowship with his wife if he 
sits idly by reading poetry while his wife has her 
sleeves rolled up and is scrubbing, lifting and cleaning. 
Now is a time when our fellowship with God must 
show itself chiefly in our passion for this work in which 
He is interested and engaged. 

But even so, we must not lose sight of the fea- 
ture of fellowship in that social service. That is the 
point that we are insisting on here. For it is the 
reality of this feature of fellowship which is the jus- 
tification of all this which is called the Supernatural in 
religion. 

There is an important difference between mere 
house-cleaning as a fact in itself and house-cleaning con- 
sidered as a feature of family life and fellowship, — be- 



64 THE SUPERNATURAL 

tween merely cleaning a house as a fact and fellowship 
expressing itself through necessary house-cleaning. In 
the one case all that is necessary is physical strength 
and some training. In the other case there has been 
involved at some time a wedding, before that a court- 
ship, a meeting and a long acquaintance. All of these 
have been necessary antecedents of that family life and 
affectionate fellowship of which this house-cleaning is 
one present necessary expression. 

If we look upon family life as merely an expedient to 
insure having some one to help with the house-cleaning 
then all this matter of courtship and affection must 
seem superfluous and absurd, — just as miracles would 
be superfluous if ethics and social service were the sole 
aim of religion. 

No supernatural elements, that is no special display 
by God of personal interest in us, would have been 
necessary if ethical considerations and sociological 
reforms were alone as independent facts, and were the 
highest possible discipline of the human life. All that 
would then have been necessary would have been 
education and motive, — training and wages. Both of 
these could be provided for in the ordinary operation of 
nature, without the personal meeting, courtship, wed- 
ding and affectionate intercourse of God's supernatural 
dispensations towards men. But these are absolutely 
necessary to effect that spirit of family affection and 
fellowship with God, which, though it is the main sup- 
port of all the present sociological movement, yet far 
transcends it, and is a fact in itself, on an immensely 
higher plane. 



SOCIAL SEEVICE 65 

Mistaken Conceptions of Fellowship 

One reason why we have not given fellowship with 
God the chief place as the essential meaning of religion 
is because we have had a wrong and inadequate idea as 
to what kind of a thing fellowship with God ought 
to be. 

"We make the mistake of thinking that fellowship 
with God is an emotional something that has only to 
do with quiet hours of abstraction and meditation. 
This is a practical age. This is an age for doing things, 
not for cultivating our obscure feelings, — not for forcing 
a sentimental glow of emotions but for hard-headed 
planning, studying and working, to meet the strenuous 
conditions of life and fill creditably one's place in 
society, as well as to help other men and better the 
condition of the world. 

But fellowship with God is not necessarily a matter 
of soft, sentimental feelings. Our fellowship with 
men is not necessarily of that nature. The fellowship 
of two sentimental schoolgirls may have considerable 
of the soft emotional about it. But our fellowship 
with people will be very much in accord with our 
characters and occupations. The fellowship of scholars 
will be on a scholarly plane. The fellowship of two 
great engineers or artists will be infused with their 
work and interests. Two business partners may have 
most intimate and constant fellowship consisting almost 
entirely of hard-headed business planning and working. 

God is a being of boundless wisdom. Surely the 
scholar may have a fellowship with such a God fully 
appropriate and satisfying to his scholarly nature. God 



66 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

made the world with all its mechanical and chemical 
subtleties, a most intricate and capable machine and a 
most perfect work of art, and He is constantly manag- 
ing all its interests and operations with perfect compe- 
tence. No engineer or artist, no business man or keen 
executive, need fear that in fellowship with God he is 
not meeting with one fully his equal in his own specialty, 
and one whom he can treat and associate with on that 
basis. He who spent fifteen long years with hammer 
and saw and plane in the Nazareth shop, working to 
buy bread for His mother and younger brothers, can 
be a congenial enough companion for any working 
man to-day. 

Is it perhaps because of exaggerated prominence we 
have so long given to pardon of sins and the conditions 
of entering heaven that we have come to consider God 
a being chiefly interested in exercises of obscure, intro- 
spective emotion, when really He is the most out- 
of-doors, practical, businesslike being in the whole 
universe. To come into real, practical companionship 
with such a being must be a bracing inspiration to any 
man in any business. There may be a fit place for 
emotion, and there is an important use for " The Quiet 
Hour," but in ordinary practice the greater part of our 
fellowship with God is to be something erect, open- 
eyed, in the broad daylight of our busy working day 
life. 

Shall we ask for a definition of this word Fellow- 
ship ? Like a great many other things, perhaps, we 
know it in our own experience better than we can 
define it in terms. Of course Prayer is a part of it, — 



SOCIAL SEEYICE 67 

but only a part. Not all of our human fellowship 
consists in talking with each other. True fellowship is 
something far deeper, of which talking is only an 
incident. 

Among other things it will imply harmony and 
cooperation in various lines. There should be harmony 
of desire, — which in the case of such a friend as God 
must be the same as obedience. There will be harmony 
of ideals, which will affect the whole range of character 
and ethics. There will be unity of purpose, which 
again must bring in the whole field of social service, — 
especially since Christ Himself has said, — " Inasmuch as 
ye have done it unto one of the least of these ye have 
done it unto me." 

In general, all that range of relations which in the 
Bible and Christian literature are indicated by the 
terms Faith, Trust, Worship, Service, Communion and 
the like are properly included under this term Fellow- 
ship. The one essential is that there be an appropriate, 
personal friendly relation with a personal God. 



PLACE OF KELIGION IN EVOLUTION 

YTfHAT is the place of religion in the evolution 
*r scheme, or in the course of nature f Under 
the old conception that religion was merely a 
means for getting into heaven, it had no place there. 
It was distinctly differentiated from things natural, 
and declared to have no connection with this world or 
natural law. 

Under the more modern popular conception religion 
is brought entirely within the sphere of nature and 
made an integral part of evolution and natural law. 
But it is made so at the expense of all its distinctive 
individuality. It is not a separate and distinct thing 
at all but just a separate name given to old elements 
always familiar in nature. It is merely aspiration 
after improvement of character, — merely morality, 
sociology and altruistic emotion, tinged with more or 
less belief of the existence of God. 

If our definition is correct, and its essence is fellow- 
ship with God, has religion then any place in the 
scheme of nature and evolution? If so, what is its 
place in the scheme ? 

We will find that it has a most natural and integral 
place in the scheme of nature and evolution, and that 
its standing is not that of a mere blend of old and 
familiar elements, but it is, as we instinctively feel it 

68 



PLACE OF KELIGION IN EVOLUTION 69 

ought to be, a new, a higher and a critical advance step 
in that great evolution progress. It is a step entirely 
different from anything achieved in the lower reaches 
of the evolution process, yet entirely consistent with 
that process. Indeed it is a step of such a nature that 
all the rest of the process may be conceived as pre- 
paratory to it, and looking forward to it as its goal or 
purpose. 

God's Eelation to This Woeld 

If religion is thus really a part of the evolution 
program what is its relation to the rest of evolved 
nature ? To answer this question we must first define 
the connection of God with nature, since religion, as 
we assume, consists in a personal relation with God. 

In nature and the evolution process the theistic 
evolutionist sees merely God's method of working. 
Whether we consider the energies and elements of 
nature to be independent entities, and that He created 
and controls them, or whether we consider them to be 
His immediate activity exerted at the time, is a ques- 
tion of no particular urgency. In either case equally 
it is all His work, instituted and established by Him. 
If it is all His work, then, as we shall see, with all 
its results, it is the expression of some purpose in His 
mind. That is the point we wish to emphasize. Each 
and every feature of nature is the result of some real 
purpose or desire in the mind of God. 

The theistic evolutionist sees in God not merely 
some force or agency behind nature producing its laws, 
but a living, autonomous person. He conceives God to 
be a real, intelligent, personal being, and as such always 



70 THE SUPEKNATUBAL 

acting with purpose, that is to say, to satisfy some 
desire. 

As a matter of fact we naturally conceive of Him 
in terms of man's own spirit or mind. He may be far 
more than that, and may have attributes and powers 
we cannot construct any conception of. But we have 
good reason to believe He has all the attributes and 
faculties that man's spirit or mind has. And so we 
form our conception of Him by imagining such a mind 
in infinite proportions. 

To do this is not the belittling of God to man's form, 
which is popularly called Anthropomorphism. On the 
contrary it is forming the highest conception of God 
that it is possible for us to form. We have no higher 
materials out of which to construct a conception. 

It is those who reject this conception who belittle 
God. To consider Him merely a great force or tend- 
ency is to make Him merely a species of physical 
energy, like heat or gravity, and measurable in horse- 
powers. To consider Him merely a great pervasion of 
life or mind stuff, without consciousness and without 
personality, is really to classify God as a great vegetable. 

We are not to define Him by bounding Him with 
any of the limitations of our own minds, but if we 
would form our highest possible conception of God we 
must conceive that He is all that we are and that all 
our ordinary positive thought processes or powers have 
a place in His mind. 

Now one of the most essential and fundamental fea- 
tures of man's mind is Purpose. Purpose or desire 
forms the source of all our acts. We have a desire, 



PLACE OP KELIGION IN EVOLUTION 71 

and we do a certain thing to realize that desire and get 
pleasure or satisfaction. Such is the essence of all per- 
sonal activity. If God is to be conceived in terms of 
the attributes of our own minds we must believe, as 
we have said above, that He also has that trait and 
that His acts are done to realize some satisfaction 
which He desires. 

What Was God's Puepose? 

If it be proper then for us to interpret all God's acts 
in terms of desire and purpose we may reasonably ask 
the question : — What satisfaction did God wish to obtain 
by any given act ? 

With us the satisfaction of any act may be physical, 
mental, social or purely ethical, but some desired satis- 
faction stands before every act as its purpose. The 
more mature, cultured and competent we are the more 
fully we will perceive and enjoy all the satisfactions 
that any act makes possible. If God is infinite and 
perfect we may assume that He perceives, enjoys and 
intended to enjoy all the satisfactions His works are 
capable of affording. 

This great universe progress or evolution process, if 
it is God's work, must not be looked upon as merely an 
aimless splash of articulated logic spreading out in 
various directions. It is a volitional act done with a 
purpose. And we must assume that God does enjoy, 
and intended to enjoy, every item of satisfaction that 
it is capable of yielding Him. 

If by this great process He has made radiant suns 
revolving in beautiful orbits, we may assume that He 



72 THE SUPERNATURAL 

enjoys fully all the satisfaction their beauty is capable 
of affording Him, and that He intended to enjoy it in 
making them. If He has made marvellous intricacies 
of chemical and physical interaction, forms of crystalli- 
zation and beauties of colour, we may assume that He 
takes from them all the artistic satisfaction they are 
capable of affording, and that He intended to do so. 
If He made animals with their wonderful actions, and 
man's mind with its wonderful powers of logic, memory 
and imagination, we may assume that these too are 
things that He takes satisfaction in watching and con- 
templating. 

Social Fellowship is the Highest Kind of 
Satisfaction 

While we could find satisfaction in the enjoyment of 
any or all of such things, there is one source of satis- 
faction and enjoyment that is far higher and more 
satisfactory to us than any one of these. That is per- 
sonal fellowship, — the social intercourse of soul with 
soul. That we consider the highest and most satisfac- 
tory form of enjoyment, and in a class by itself above 
all other kinds. 

If there were the possibility then of God's taking 
that kind of satisfaction also from anything that He 
had made, must we not assume that He would cer- 
tainly do so ? When His created creatures had evolved 
up to the level of intellectual, moral, social man there 
was a creature which could afford to Him that species 
of satisfaction. There was a creature that could afford 
to Him precisely this which we consider the highest 



PLACE OP RELIGION IN EVOLUTION 73 

form of satisfaction. So must we not assume that He 
would take the enjoyment of that fellowship, and that 
that was one of His intentions in the development of 
this creature, man ? Or rather we may say : — When 
the Bible distinctly declares that God does desire and 
ask for that fellowship we must at least concede that it 
is not declaring something unscientific or illogical. 

To say that there could be this interplay of social 
communion between man and God does not imply that 
man has become as great as God or in the same class 
with Him. It merely implies that God is as great as 
man and has every capacity and faculty that man has. 
With a being of a still higher order than man there 
might be between that being and God something as 
much higher than this fellowship as social fellowship is 
higher than chemical affinity. But this interplay of 
soul communion which can take place between you and 
another man can certainly take place between you and 
God, for God has every power and capacity that that 
other man has. And in as far as God's nature is to be 
conceived in terms of our nature we must assume that 
He would find satisfaction in that interplay of com- 
munion, would want it, and would plan to have it. 

This fellowship with God which our Bible teaches is 
a perfectly natural extension then of the one great 
evolution progress. It is simply the highest yet evolved 
of many progressive advances. We may start with 
merely matter and energy existing. Then we have 
next physical motions and chemical affinity, — the 
action of energy upon matter. Then we have life, — 
the control of energy and matter by life and mind, 



74 THE SUPERNATURAL 

culminating in conscious volition and an autonomous 
person. As this person advances higher and higher he 
at length reaches a stage when there is possible this 
communion and companionship between him and God, 
so that begins. 

It is no more supernatural or abnormal for it to be- 
gin than it was for chemical combination to begin as 
soon as advancing conditions arrived at the stage 
where it was possible, or for life to begin its career of 
control and conscious achievement as soon as the con- 
ditions had developed for that. 

It is all very natural, indeed necessary, when we 
come to take this ultimate and adequate view of the 
evolution process, — when we come to view as the basal 
fact not the material and energies and the changes they 
are made to go through, but God planning all those 
changes and effectively bringing them about. Viewed 
that way evolution has intelligible meaning. That is 
the only view of evolution that philosophy and the- 
ology should take or can be satisfied with. Nor has 
science any particular reason to combat that view. 

Cleak-Cut Concept of God 
It may seem at first, perhaps, to some that this is 
merely a speculative discursion, — interesting but of no 
conclusive value. But it is more than that. It is 
rather an attempt to force a clear-cut form to our con- 
ception of God, — the common conception that " God is 
a Spirit," and to follow that conception out to its legit- 
imate results. It is not scientific to form hazy, indis- 
tinct, indefinite conceptions. If there are just three 



PLACE OF KELIGION IN EVOLUTION 75 

kinds of things that we know anything about, — matter, 
energy and mind, — we do know something very defi- 
nite about each of them, as to what they can do, and 
we must treat them accordingly. 

If we conceive a thing to be matter we must think of 
it as having the attributes that matter has ; if as energy 
we must think of it in terms of the attributes and laws 
that energy has. Equally if we conceive it to be mind 
we must think of it in terms of the characteristic at- 
tributes and propensities that mind is known to have. 

We are merely insisting that God, " A Spirit," must 
be conceived as having the characteristic attributes and 
propensities that we see in the other spirits that we 
know, that is to say that like all other minds He does 
things to secure satisfactions that He desires. Also 
that like all other minds that we know, one of the 
things that would appeal to Him as a satisfaction to 
be desired would be fellowship and personal intercourse 
with other minds. 

We perhaps should note the fact that the pleasure 
we find in fellowship comes from giving favours and 
happiness to a loved one quite as much or more than 
from receiving favours. The higher and purer the na- 
ture of the man the more the pleasure of giving comes 
to exceed the pleasure of receiving. We might con- 
ceive, therefore, that with the infinitely high and per- 
fect nature of God it would be the pleasure of giving 
favours only that He would desire. When we speak 
hereafter of God deriving pleasure from our fellowship 
we ought perhaps to consider that this giving of 
favours is what affords Him pleasure in the fellowship. 



76 THE SUPERNATURAL 

Still that is real fellowship and all we may say applies 
to that as much as to any other kind of fellowship, if 
that is the thing that God desires. All our obedience, 
service and communion may be desired by God only 
for the benefit and happiness they bring to us. 

Grant then that the evolution process is the product 
of mind acting with a purpose, and it is perfectly legit- 
imate and logical to conclude, from the analogy of 
our own minds, that one of the purposes or desires the 
Supreme Mind might have had in view was the satis- 
faction of fellowship and personal communion with 
these evolved minds as soon as they had evolved high 
enough to make it possible. 

We say " might have had," for notice that all we 
are trying to show in this place is merely that the 
fellowship with God, which our Bible teaches, is in the 
line of the evolution process, — that it belongs in the 
same enterprise as all the rest of nature. We are not 
claiming by the above argument to positively prove 
that this fellowship is a fact and that God desires it, 
though really the argument does have great force as 
pointing that way. We have that belief already from 
other sources. We are taking for granted that God 
does desire this fellowship, — that there is sufficient 
ground in the Bible and in other religious teaching 
for believing that God's desire for this fellowship and 
His granting it to men is a fact. We are merely in- 
sisting here that this accepted fact of fellowship be- 
tween men and God is not something entirely apart 
from nature and outside of the evolution process. It is 
strictly part and parcel of the one great scheme of na- 



PLACE OF KELIGION IN EVOLUTION 77 

ture. It is distinctly connected with and implied in 
the great evolution movement, — if indeed it may not 
be considered the one great goal and culmination of 
the whole process of biological evolution. 

It is thus then that we would find our answer to the 
question, " What is the relation of religion to nature 
and the evolution process ? " It is an integral part 
and culmination of it all. For religion is fellowship 
with God, and this fellowship with God is quite of a 
piece with God's purpose in all the rest of evolving 
nature. 

PUKPOSE OF THE WHOLE EVOLUTION PEOCESS 

Keally the theistic scientist should be a much more 
enthusiastic admirer of evolution than the materialist 
or agnostic, because it means so much more to him and 
is so much more complete and reasonable. The mate- 
rialist or agnostic merely sees a long chain of articulated 
changes following each other and growing out of cause 
and effect. He follows back along the route of this 
progress, and presently he comes to a great chasm that 
he cannot bridge. For the introduction of life is a fact 
for which he has thus far been unable to find any 
adequate cause. 

But picking up the trail again beyond that break, 
he finds the same receding line of physical interactions 
and chemical combinations. He follows still back. 
He knows that this progress could not have been going 
on forever. It must have started some time but he is 
utterly unable to find any cause that could have started 
it, or any reason why it should not have started un- 



78 THE SUPERNATURAL 

thinkable millions of ages earlier if it was capable of 
starting at all. 

Beyond a certain point in the past, then, there is to 
him an utterly incomprehensible blank. Looking for- 
ward also he is able to see nothing but the gradual 
running down of the forces and processes now in prog- 
ress, and beyond that an equally void and incom- 
prehensible blank. 

To the materialist evolution is merely a magnificent 
fragment. It is like a vast bridge, resting on nothing 
at either end, and even broken in two in the middle. 

But to the theistic evolutionist all is clear and logical, 
and as natural as for a man to move his hand or limb. 
It is all simply an act of God done by Him to achieve 
some object which He wished to achieve. God stands 
in eternity, like all mind or spirit not necessitated to 
fixed times but freely at His own will and time origi- 
nating acts and carrying them on. This great universe 
process, so long and vast to us, is but one of His leisurely 
acts. He began it when He chose to do so, and is con- 
sistently and competently carrying it on. 

Not only does every phase of the act and its product 
yield presumably some satisfaction to Him, but we 
may plausibly suppose that, like our acts, it has some 
central, determining purpose which is the primary 
object it is to achieve in its totality. 

If this be so it would not be impossible to suppose 
that this main purpose of it all or at least of that part 
of it which we call Biological Evolution was precisely 
this which we have been considering, this desire on 
God's part to have this pleasure of fellowship, — to pro* 



PLACE OF KELIGION IN EVOLUTION 79 

duce a race of beings capable of affording Him this 
opportunity which He desired of bestowing fellow- 
ship. 

We must not suppose, of course, that this means any- 
thing like a companionship of equality between God 
and men. It does not mean that like companionship 
between equals this would fill all God's mind and be a 
major factor in His life. We may suppose that it 
would be no more to God comparatively than to a man 
would be the companionship of a pet bird or kitten, or 
something a million times smaller still. Yet it would 
be true, genuine fellowship. God did want it. And 
all this evolution process was His act bringing it about. 
And all this evolution process, by the way, though so 
long to us, is an act that would bulk no larger, com- 
paratively, in His infinite life than would to a man the 
act of plucking a violet to smell its fragrance. 

The Evolution Process Foreshadows Fellow- 
ship by Men With God 

When we turn to the converse side we find practically 
the same lesson taught by the evolution process. 

Progress has branched out in many directions, and 
various different species might perhaps be considered 
the most advanced in each of several lines. We might, 
perhaps, consider the tiger, the elephant, the eagle, the 
ant, etc., as each marking the highest attainment of 
evolution in their particular directions. And yet in 
considering the ultimate trend or meaning of the 
evolution system we do not consider any one of them 
of any significance, but only the one line which has led 



80 THE SUPEBNATUKAL 

up to our human species, and man himself at the head 
of it. 

In man himself we no longer consider the develop- 
ment of the physical body as the significant, governing 
fact, but wholly the development in the sphere of mind 
and spiritual functions. 

There have been several great items of development 
in this sphere. At some point in the past the advanc- 
ing species first developed the power of abstract 
thought, of logical reasoning, of articulate speech, of 
moral consciousness. All these were advance steps, 
taken when the time was ripe for them. And they 
added very much to the worth and rank of the develop- 
ing creature. 

Of course the evolution advance is going on now just 
as much as ever. There are new forward steps yet to 
be taken by this developing species. This advance may 
possibly be in a number of different lines, but there is 
one line most plausible and probable and which seems 
to be the most promising of them all. That is the line 
of social progress. 

Man has made great advance and development on 
the side of his social nature. Social fellowship is 
perhaps the most important of all the factors that 
make up life. It is noble and ennobling in proportion 
with the greatness and nobility of the persons with 
whom we have the social fellowship. If then we 
should come to be able to have this same social fellow- 
ship with God Himself it would manifestly mean the 
greatest benefit and ennobling that we can conceive of, 
coming to us. 



PLACE OF BELIGION IN EVOLUTION 81 

As we look back over the course of evolution we see 
evolving nature apparently able some way to attain 
every phase of advance that has presented itself as 
valuable. In every case, in some way the facilities 
have at the right time been provided for making the 
particular advance that would be profitable. Analogy 
would therefore lead us to expect that this advance 
step will also be made, and that the facilities will all be 
afforded for man to make it. It certainly would be a 
most fitting and most splendid next step of evolution 
progress, and we may believe that it is very probable 
that it will actually be made. 

The facilities that would make this fellowship possible 
would be for God to bestow manifest acts of fellow- 
ship on His part, and to plainly invite it from us. It 
is not unreasonable, therefore, to expect that such acts 
of fellowship would be granted by Him to us. And 
that is just what He is represented as doing in all the 
supernatural in the Bible. That is exactly what all 
the supernatural is. 

We have seen, then, that an advance into a state of 
fellowship with God seems a plausible next step in the 
evolution of man. And we have also seen that consider- 
ations of God's purpose in the whole creation process 
would lead us to expect that He would want that fellow- 
ship and would therefore bestow fellowship upon us. 

From both sides, thus, it is seen to appear probable 
that the next step in the evolution process at this point 
will be an advance into a state of social fellowship be- 
tween God and men. And this is precisely what we 
have defined religion in its essence to be. 



82 THE SUPEKNATUBAL 

Keligion, therefore, defined as personal fellowship 
between men and God, is not only something consistent 
with and part of the evolution system. It is a supreme 
and culminating part of that system, to which all the 
lower parts of the system look forward as their purpose 
or goal. And all the supernatural in the Bible, since it 
is but the concrete acts of that fellowship on God's 
side, is really a perfectly logical and integral part of 
the one great evolution movement. 



VI 
VALUE OF THE SUPEKNATUKAL 

WHAT, then, is the meaning, the value and 
the use of the supernatural in the Bible? 
It is not enough merely to prove that it is 
not unreasonable, not a blemish and a burden. It must 
have some positive use. And since it is such a large 
factor and prominent feature of the Book it must have 
some very important and fundamental value. What is 
that value ? The answer has been already quite evi- 
dently outlined. 

It is too common with us to think of all God's ac- 
tions towards men as intended solely to advance right 
living and make the world better. We thus conceive 
that the supernatural should be primarily a contribu- 
tion towards that object, that the prophecy and revela- 
tion were intended to teach men right conduct and the 
supernatural acts to reward or punish them for their 
good or bad lives. Or on broader lines we conceive of 
God dealing with nations to restrain their evil tenden- 
cies, and to specially preserve and prosper one nation 
that was better than the rest and train and make it fit 
to be a model and inspiration to the rest of the world. 

Beally God does do all those things, but He does not 
do them by supernatural acts. He does them all by 
natural law. He was wise and competent enough to be 
able in His first great creative system to foresee and 

83 



84 THE SUPEKNATUBAL 

provide entirely sufficient agencies for all that. He 
never has to do any supplementary work now for that 
purpose. As we have already seen, any supplementary 
acts now primarily for such a purpose would be a re- 
flection on the sufficiency of His great creative act, — 
which was explicitly declared to be " All very Good " 
(Gen. 1. 31). 

Secondaey Uses 

A very common interpretation is that the supernatu- 
ral acts, or many of them, were done for the purpose 
of accrediting divine teachers and teaching. God was 
giving revelation of rules for right living and worship, 
and in order that men might be assured that these 
rules and commandments were really from God He 
accompanied them with various supernatural signs as 
proof that they were really from Him. Yarious im- 
portant religious doctrines were revealed, and in order 
that men should be convinced that they were from God 
and to be believed, God accompanied their revelation 
with some special divine mark or supernatural sign. 

It cannot be denied that that value does inhere in 
some of these acts. Such acts as are recorded to have 
been done by Christ and by the apostles and prophets 
are certainly adequate proof that the power of God was 
working through and with them, and they do increase 
our feeling that what they said and did had the in- 
dorsement of God. Jesus Himself appeals to His 
supernatural works as evidence of His person and 
authority (John 10 : 38), though there is conclusive 
proof that that was not the motive that prompted 
them (cf. Mark 8 : 12). 



YALUE OP THE SUPERNATURAL 85 

Since we can find, as we see elsewhere, an entirely 
sufficient motive for all these supernatural facts aside 
from their evidential or disciplinary value, and a mo- 
tive that brings them entirely within the program of 
nature and the evolution scheme, we may freely admit 
that as secondary results or by-products they not only 
give important teaching and accredit divine agents, but 
were definitely intended by God to do so. Saying 
that is saying no more than when we say : — " The 
heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament 
showeth his handiwork." Both the act of making the 
heavens revolve and the act of performing these special 
personal deeds are equally and alike proofs of the 
presence of God and contributions to our knowledge of 
Him. But that is not the principal purpose that pro- 
duced the acts in either case. 

These acts have on appropriate grounds an acknowl- 
edged and integral place in the one great universe 
scheme, and their specialness is fully justified, so there 
is no more incongruity in their contributing to common 
evolutional enterprises, like the teaching and welfare 
of men, than there would be in electricity or chemical 
affinity so contributing. And yet it is impossible for 
us to accept that as the principal purpose that produced 
them. 

It is quite proper, in colloquial use, to say that these 
supernatural facts do contribute and were intended to 
contribute to the teaching and welfare of men, and to 
accredit men with special divine authority. Indeed 
in our ordinary devotional thought and evangelical 
preaching that, perhaps, is the purpose we ought 



86 THE SUPEEKATUEAL 

chiefly and ordinarily to attribute to them. Just as it 
would be silly pedantry in our colloquial talk to refuse 
to speak of the sun rising and setting. 

But it is different when we come to make an exact 
philosophical definition. Then we must recognize that 
it would be illogical to conceive of God doing any 
special or supernatural act primarily and specifically 
for the purpose of giving teaching that could not have 
been gotten otherwise, or of accrediting some person to 
give such teaching. 

Primary Motive of the Supernatural 

When we come to make a philosophical definition, 
and seek the one fundamental purpose for which all 
these supernatural acts were done, we will find that 
they were all done as acts of fellowship by God to 
men, and done just for fellowship's sake. That is their 
primary purpose, that is their meaning, and that is 
what we must consider the one fundamental value of 
all of them. 

When we realize that this is their meaning and their 
purpose, all the philosophical objections to them dis- 
appear entirely. They cease to be exceptional, abnor- 
mal events and interpositions that have to be justified 
and accounted for, and take their place as a natural 
and appropriate, — indeed necessary, — part of the one 
great universe enterprise of God. 

For we have already seen that the whole of Biological 
Evolution seems to look forward as its culmination to 
God enjoying fellowship with man when he was de- 
veloped. That seems to be the most natural and 



VALUE OF THE SUPEBNATUKAL 87 

plausible step to expect, and indeed seems to have 
been the purpose that underlay the whole enterprise 
from the beginning. And these supernatural acts are 
merely the concrete exercise of that fellowship. They 
are really the only way in which it could be effectively 
bestowed. 

All the supernatural acts are personal acts of fellow- 
ship done by God to men just because He wanted to 
engage in that fellowship. The fellowship of the acts 
themselves was the one great purpose and primary 
cause, and such a fellowship was a purpose that 
practically lay infolded in all the course of evolution 
that went before it and led up to it. This fellowship 
was as distinctly contemplated in the one great original 
constitution of things as any other part of the evolution 
program, — just as much as revolving of suns or chemical 
affinity or human reason. The intention of this fellow- 
ship in the mind of God was a distinct part, and 
possibly one of the major parts of the impulse that 
brought about the whole universe process. 

Fellowship Must Consist of Just Such Acts 
It is obvious that fellowship could only be had by 
means of some such acts as these supernatural events 
recorded in the Bible. It must consist essentially of 
just what these acts are. Fellowship must consist of 
personal acts of God done to specific individuals, and 
that is an accurate and complete description of just 
what all these supernatural acts consist of (cf. pp. 
33, 34, etc.). 
Here then we have the entire answer to the question : 



88 THE SUPEKNATUBAL 

— What is the purpose, meaning and use of these 
supernatural acts? They are all acts of fellowship. 
That is the one main purpose that philosophy must 
recognize, even though there may be other secondary 
results and by-products from them which seem to us 
more evident and important because they give such 
exceedingly great personal benefits to us. 

That God could accord fellowship to men only by 
doing acts like these supernatural acts of the Bible will 
be readily apparent. What is fellowship ? What is it 
as it exists between man and man in human relations ? 
We will doubtless agree that it must be something 
immediate, something directed to definite individuals 
and something personal. 

There is no fellowship in the fact that you live 
under the rule of the king of England or the emperor 
of Germany and get the protection and benefits that 
come from their rule. There is no fellowship in the 
fact that you contribute a sum of money to a famine 
relief fund for a general distribution of food. There 
is no fellowship in the fact that you get great benefit 
from the machines invented by Singer or Bell. 

But it is fellowship when the king or emperor stops 
in a hospital to speak a word to a single wounded 
soldier, though the benefit received be not nearly so 
great as in the other case. It is fellowship if you take 
the money or the food and go personally and give it 
definitely to one or more sufferers. It is fellowship if the 
inventor takes you personally through his factory and 
explains all its workings, or even if he merely meets 
you on the street and asks the way to the post-office. 



VALUE OF THE SUPEESTATUKAL 89 

There is no fellowship in the fact that you receive 
from God the sunlight and the air, that He makes the 
crops grow that feed you and spreads out all nature to 
give you instruction, comfort and joy. " In Him we 
live and move and have our being,' ' but there is no 
fellowship in that. 

But it was fellowship if He specially at one single 
time provided the meal for the support of the widow 
of Sarepta (1 Kings IT : 16), or preserved the lives of 
the three Hebrews in the fiery furnace (Dan. 3 : 19-25). 
It was fellowship if He stood and talked with Abra- 
ham of the eruption that was going to destroy the cities 
of the plain (Gen. 18 : 16-33). It was fellowship if He 
ever did any favour to any man that was intended di- 
rectly for him alone and was not merely a spontaneous 
working of natural agencies available for any one that 
might avail himself of it. 

That is the nature of all these incidents in the Bible 
that are called supernatural. They are merely God 
doing immediate, personal acts to individuals. They 
are acts that are no more divine than the sunlight or 
chemical affinity are, but unlike those things they are 
acts not universal, continuous and general for all the 
world, but restricted to the one time, and specifically 
directed to some person or limited group. That is the 
feature that causes us to give them the name supernat- 
ural. And that really is the feature that gives them 
all their value (cf. Chapter II). 

This supernatural in the Bible contains just the fea- 
tures necessary to constitute it fellowship in the fullest 
degree. It is composed of just the two most character- 



90 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

istic elements that constitute ordinary fellowship. It 
consists of both conversations, — prophecy, — and fa- 
vours, — miracles, — the very two things most character- 
istic of our ordinary human fellowships. If God is to 
give fellowship at all this is just the way we must ex- 
pect that He would give it. 

It is Fellowship for Fellowship's Sake 
These supernatural acts are not primarily a means to 
effect something or to prove something. They are the 
very thing itself. The mother does not kiss her child 
to prove that she loves it or to teach it something, nor 
yet for any physical benefit it is to the child. It is not 
done as a means for something else. She kisses it be- 
cause she wants to kiss it. The kiss itself is the object. 
It is the natural method of fellowship between the 
mother and her child. It requires no other explana- 
tion or justification. "Whatever other benefits may or 
may not result indirectly from it, that is its essential 
meaning and value. 

Just so the supernatural, both the favours and the 
conversation, is all just the normal, natural outflow of 
God's friendship reaching out and touching various 
men because God wanted to give friendship, fellowship 
and personal touch to them specifically. It is itself the 
important fact and itself the purpose and the object. 

We ought to entirely dismiss from our minds the 
idea that God was doing all His recorded acts of kind- 
ness and helpfulness to people for the sake of some ul- 
terior motive of teaching or elevating the world. That 
would be considering God as always " acting a part," 



VALUE OP THE SUPEENATTJEAL 91 

and in a degree insincere. God is the most genuine 
and sincere being in the universe, and we misjudge 
Him if we try to attribute any of His acts of kindness 
to any ulterior and calculated motives. The personal 
kindness itself is always God's primary desire and mo- 
tive, and any other beneficial results are entirely sec- 
ondary and incidental. 

This Supernatural Eegime is the Basis and 
Substance of Eeligion 

Just because these incidents have that meaning, the 
fact of their occurrence is a fact of enormous impor- 
tance to us. All our religion is based upon that fact 
and grows out of it. We could not have any religion 
at all without these incidents, or without the belief of 
something like them or equivalent to them. 

We could have Theology. We could have Ethics. 
We could have all that pertains to both belief and 
character. Those are things that are amply provided 
for by ordinary natural law in the evolution process. 
That is the proper source from which to expect to get 
help towards them. Indeed we have seen that we 
could not justify the thought of God doing anything 
supernatural directly and primarily for the purpose of 
assisting towards those objects. 

But religion, — a felt sense of fellowship with God, — 
is something which for us grows directly out of our be- 
lief that God has done, and therefore may be expected 
to do, personal acts to individuals. It could not be 
produced in any other way. 

And may we not surmise that the present tendency 



92 THE SUPERNATURAL 

in some quarters to drop that feature of real fellowship 
with God out of religion and make it solely and ex- 
clusively a matter of character and social service, is a 
logical and inevitable result from the denial or waning 
belief in these supernatural acts recorded in the Bible. 
This tendency, by the way, to so specially emphasize 
the features of character and service, we need not con- 
sider as something bad. ]STo great movement that 
God's evolution process brings about is ever wholly 
bad. This tendency is to a large extent a distinctly 
salutary one. It will have enormous good results in 
the world. It has corrected a too mystical and selfish 
attitude which had come to characterize Christian life, 
and turned the direction of men's activities to the eth- 
ical and sociological work which was always intended 
to be their object. 

But we need the heart and life as well as the activi- 
ties. And the heart and life must consist in the re- 
ligion of fellowship with God. That is something 
which our fathers got by firm belief of these friend- 
ship acts of God to men, and we may only get it again 
by return to the same source. 

It is not too much to say that the paramount value 
of the whole Bible to us lies precisely in these parts and 
these features of it which we call the Supernatural, he- 
cause they are the actual exercise on GooVs part of that 
fellowship with men which is the essence of religion. 

Silent Fellowship 
We may notice, however, that fellowship may be of 
two kinds. It may be active and concrete, or it may 



VALUE OF THE SUPEENATUEAL 93 

be silent and passive. It may ordinarily consist of 
conversations between two persons and various cour- 
tesies and favours done by one to the other, but it may 
consist in the mutual consciousness of being present 
with one another, with nothing said or done. In that 
case, however, there must be the memory of conver- 
sations, favours or other personal acts and communi- 
cations in the past, to make it real fellowship. 

It is here that we find the great importance of the 
miracles in the Bible as a contribution towards our 
fellowship with God now. "We may presume that the 
greater part of our fellowship with God now will not 
consist in spectacular or miraculous receiving of favours 
and revelations, but will be of this last named, silent 
kind, as when two persons are together in enjoyable 
companionship without any actual conversation or com- 
munications passing between them. 

We know that God is present with us, and being so 
the remembrance of these acts of personal favour and 
fellowship to individuals recorded in the Bible enables 
us to have the feeling of real fellowship with Him. 
For though these acts were not done to us yet they 
were done personally to individuals like ourselves, and 
that enables us to have the feeling to some extent. 

Now of course, on the other hand, it is true prob- 
ably with most of us that this feeling of fellowship 
with God is greatly roused by the memory of certain 
conspicuous personal experiences of our own, as for in- 
stance at our conversion, or at some great deliverance 
or answer to prayer, when we have felt very vividly 
that God was with us and giving us a favour. 



94 THE STJPEBNATUEAL 

But here also there is no question that these special 
experiences of our own were really the result of the 
Bible Supernatural, — that it was the influence of these 
instances of personal touch by God to men recorded in 
the Bible which, consciously or unconsciously, con- 
tributed decisively to make it possible for us to have 
these experiences and to realize and feel that they 
were actually the work of God. We would never 
have been able to do so without the influences of that 
record, as we shall see presently. 

Teaching Value of the Supernatural 
This opens up to us the whole question of the teach- 
ing value of these supernatural acts. This question we 
can freely take up without embarrassment now that we 
have found an independent purpose for their occurrence 
which is quite in accord with reason and with all the 
evolution movement. 

If fellowship with God is an integral part of the 
evolution process, and all the so-called supernatural 
events in the Bible are merely acts of fellowship by 
God to men, then these acts are all a normal and in- 
tegral part of nature. They are inside of the evolu- 
tion system when rightly considered, and there can 
be no possible objection urged against them either 
on scientific or philosophical grounds. Though some- 
what rare and unusual they are just as normal and 
legitimate a part of the evolution machinery as 
magnetism, or earthquakes, or the first introduction 
of life, or any other phase of the great panorama of 
nature. 



VALUE OF THE SUPEBNATUKAL 95 

If then they are a perfectly normal part of the 
machinery of nature the way is freely open for us to 
estimate their teaching value and ethical use. Such 
an inquiry would be greatly embarrassed as long as we 
felt compelled to consider them special interpositions 
outside the evolution machinery. We would be obliged 
to ask in every instance : — " Is it reasonable that God 
should bring in this outside agency to secure this 
benefit and teaching when it might possibly have been 
produced by the agencies already provided in nature ? " 
"Why, if He was infinitely competent, did He not 
provide in the first constitution of things a means to 
produce this good result as He did for so very many 
others ? " 

But now we are no longer confronted with that 
question. For these agencies are just as integral and 
legitimate a part of nature and the machinery of evo- 
lution as any other agencies. And it is therefore just 
as proper to look to them for desired results as it is to 
look to any other source. 

We will find that these things to which we give the 
name Miracles or Supernatural events have a very dis- 
tinct teaching and inspirational value to us. And the 
value grows precisely out of their specialness or so- 
called supernaturalness. 

The whole genius of our religion and spiritual life 
is of the same essential character as this which we 
call the supernatural, and it needs the sight of these 
concrete, visible events to make real and credible to 
us much of our own inner, spiritual experience which 
does not have visible, material verification. 



96 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

An Illustration 

We may illustrate by a concrete and typical incident. 
A young preacher was recently appointed to a parish 
some distance down the seacoast. He planned and 
arranged to go there by a certain steamer. But some 
way he was delayed by farewell meetings and leave- 
takings so that he just missed the boat and it went off 
without him. That night that boat was wrecked a 
short distance down the coast, and nearly every one 
on board was drowned. That young man has 
always felt that being caused to miss that boat 
was a special favour intentionally brought about by 
God for him, and it has greatly increased and made 
vivid his sense of nearness to God and fellowship with 
Him. 

Is it reasonable and correct that he should feel so ? 
Those events all came about by natural and normal 
causes. The storm, the rock, the farewell meetings 
and lingering leave-takings were all perfectly normal 
and natural things. Why should he think that God 
had anything to do with them, even if they all did 
converge to produce a situation that was to him a very 
happy escape from death ? 

Or, to look on the question from another view- 
point : — Everything that occurs is ultimately the result 
of God's work. It was equally the work of God that 
when he walked by a mountain the cliffs adhered to- 
gether by cohesion and did not fall and crush him, or 
that the waters of the ocean were held in their bed by 
gravitation and did not flow out and engulf him. But 
in neither of those cases is there any remote suggestion 



VALUE OF THE 8UPEENATUEAL 97 

of any conscious intention on God's part directed per- 
sonally towards his safety. 

Though there was rather a peculiar situation and 
grateful coincidence here, yet what rational grounds 
could justify him in believing that there was here, any 
more than in the other case, any conscious intention on 
God's part directed towards his safety ? 

"We may answer that he could reasonably think so if 
he knew that it was GooVs custom to thus consciously 
care for individuals and intentionally arrange for fa- 
vours to come to them personally. Or if he knew that 
God did such things for persons who were trvmg to live 
in fellowship with Him, and he was conscious of thus 
trying to live in fellowship with God. In that case it 
would be reasonable for him to believe that this was 
an instance of that same kind of thing that he knew 
had occurred in the past, and that it was, what it ap- 
peared on its face to be, a case of God really doing a 
personal favour to him. 

ISTow these miracles of the Bible are all distinctly ar- 
ranged to produce just that feeling and belief. In the 
first place they are, as we shall see, practically all acts 
of helpfulness to persons who were in some distinct 
relation of fellowship with God. In the second place 
they are so arranged as to conspicuously be seen to be 
God's work. Their most prominent characteristic is 
this specialness which marks them as God's personal 
acts. They are either things out of the ordinary course 
of nature or things specially predicted and promised 
beforehand. This specialness impresses that they are 
really acts of God's special intention, and they are thus 



98 THE SUPEBNATUBAL 

vividly felt to be God doing personal favours to specific 
individuals, and thus make us feel that that is a thing 
that God may be expected to do. 

The great benefit, then, which the miracles bring to 
us in our present personal life, is to impress upon us 
and make us feel vividly that God cares personally 
for us as individuals and may be expected to do 
things specifically and intentionally for personal fa- 
vours to us. 

We need not stop to ask the question whether possi- 
bly men could not have learned this truth about God 
in some other way, by a philosophical induction from 
His perfection perhaps, or some other process. Whether 
they could or could not have gained that knowledge 
and feeling by some other process this is the process 
that God intended should produce it. And as we have 
seen that these miracles are just as integral a part of 
the evolution machinery as anything else, it is just as 
reasonable that He should plan that it be done by this 
agency as by any other. 

Historically it is a fact that that is the way in which 
this feeling has been produced and ingrained in the 
Christian consciousness. It has come about by a long 
heredity of vivid belief that God did these acts of per- 
sonal kindness to individuals recounted in the Bible 
and called supernatural. Even with those that doubt 
or repudiate all these miracles this same feeling is 
present in their hearts as an unconscious legacy from 
this same source. 

This is not a new doctrine. Such has always been 
the feeling and belief of Christians, only we have not 



VALUE OF THE SUPEBNATUEAL 99 

always given it the frank recognition and prominence 
in our systems of theology which it ought to have. 

Special Pkovidence 

It will be proper at this point to consider a possible 
wrong impression that may have been caused by the 
frequently repeated assertion that God does not inter- 
fere with the evolution process, — that He will never 
do a supernatural act primarily for the sake of teaching 
any truth, advancing any good cause, or making the 
world or any individual better. We have said that all 
these objects are the natural province of the evolution 
process and were all provided for from the beginning 
as God wished them to be provided for, so He will 
never do anything special now primarily for the pur- 
pose of furthering them. 

Does this mean that there is no such thing as what 
we call Providence ? — that we may never expect God 
to do any present act now for our help ? Does it mean 
that our conception of God's present sympathetic, per- 
sonal care over us and provision for us is a mistake ? 
Does it mean that we are left entirely to our own re- 
sources in our efforts to succeed in life, and the thought 
that we have a heavenly Father, who takes a friendly 
interest in helping and directing us, is a delusion ? 

Does it mean that the world is grinding away under 
the sway of evolutional forces and natural law alone, 
and however much those laws and forces may tend to 
baffle, crush, and destroy us, God will look on indiffer- 
ent, and do nothing to protect or help us ? Is our con- 
ception that " God is making all things work together 



100 THE SUPERNATURAL 

for good to them that love him" (Rom. 8 : 28), and that 
we need fear no evil while He is near us (Ps. 23 : 4), 
merely a pious superstition ? Are we left in all things 
absolutely to the results of the working of natural 
law? 

Not at all. We have said only that God will never 
do a special or supernatural suet for the purpose of mak- 
ing the world better, or for the purpose of advancing 
any of the work that natural law and evolution are en- 
gaged on. That is the " Manufacturing Process." God 
was competent enough to make machinery entirely ade- 
quate to perfect the manufacturing, and does not need 
nor intend to interfere to do any part of it by hand. 

But that does not mean that He is never going to 
come into any personal touch with the product after it 
is manufactured and He takes it over for use. The use 
that He intends to make of this manufactured product — 
namely men — is to engage with them in the enjoyable 
interplay of social fellowship and friendship. Any 
kind of present personal activity by God or any help to 
us that would come under that category may be freely 
expected and looked for. 

We have said that whatever special personal acts 
God may do they are never done primarily for the pur- 
pose of making the world wiser and better or effecting 
anything that natural law was established to effect. 
We were speaking specifically and solely of the primary 
purpose of the acts, — not of the possibility of such 
present personal acts, nor yet of their incidental results, 
but only of the formal purpose for which they were 
done. We have assumed that such personal acts are 



VALUE OF THE SUPERNATURAL 101 

done. The whole teaching of the Bible as well as the 
universal instincts of men assert that there are such 
acts, — that God does do personal acts and exert control 
for the benefit of individuals. 

What we are insisting on here is that the motive for 
these acts is just a homely personal kindness to the 
persons affected. God's motive in it all is not " The 
Manufacturing Interests," — making the world better, 
or teaching and training the race, but purely and simply 
the desire to be kind and companionable to some one, 
because it is a pleasure to Him to be kind and com- 
panionable to persons. That is a purpose and motive 
that, in our philosophy, we can justify. Any other we 
could not. 

From the view-point maintained here we are right in 
feeling that God is personally controlling and directing 
things in our interest. We are right in feeling that 
with sympathetic interest in us He is constantly giving 
us help in our business and in our lives, removing diffi- 
culties and dangers, and effectively guiding us into 
the most advantageous ways. Certainly He does 
those things. And it is precisely the prime intention 
of all the discussions thus far made to show that He 
does do them, and that it is possible to do them with- 
out in the least colliding with the integrity of natural 
law and the evolution system. 

Such personal care and help of God to the individual 
is not only possible and reasonable. It is the character- 
istic feature of this present era. This might indeed be 
called the era of religion, — the era of fellowship be- 
tween God and men. 



102 THE SUPERNATURAL 

What we have been insisting on is that such personal 
help and care is not an amateurish effort to piece out 
an incomplete work, or an expedient to repair some 
damage that has developed. It is an entirely reason- 
able and integral part of God's one great plan, and 
has the same standing in that respect as anything else 
in evolution or natural law. For it is the very path 
that evolution was designed and intended to take at 
this stage of the progress. 

Not Under Law but Grace 
The declaration that "We are not under the Law 
but under Grace " (Rom. 6:14) has really far wider 
application than the mere matter of sin and punish- 
ment. It applies to our whole standing and treatment 
by God. It extends in a certain sense even to natural 
law. Natural law is still in operation, and we are still 
in contact with it, but we are not left under its un- 
hindered dominance. We stand in such a personal, 
companionable relation to the one who established and 
is carrying on all this natural law that He will see that 
our personal interests are personally and sympathetic- 
ally cared for quite irrespective of what would have 
ordinarily been the effects of natural law unhampered 
upon us. 

Not less but much more than under the old inter- 
pretations may we feel God's personal care an actual 
factor in all our experiences and enterprises. Such 
care is not a special thing, an interposition, a side enter- 
prise. It is just the appropriate condition of the stage 
of evolution at which we have arrived. It is just as 



VALUE OF THE SUPEENATUEAL 103 

reasonable and natural for this stage as gravitation or 
reproduction in the previous stages of the process. 

God is our personal friend now, and wants to do and 
will do for us everything that it is appropriate for a 
friend to do. That is the dominant fact of this era. 
It is something that takes precedence over all the 
claims of natural law, and to which even natural law 
must contribute. For He who is our friend is the 
author and master of natural law itself. 

The only thing that conditions all this is that we 
really be in this relation of friends and companions of 
God. It must be a mutual affair. Friendship and 
fellowship must always be so. Only if we have defi- 
nitely assumed that relation of friend and companion 
does it apply to us, — only in the degree that we are in 
whole-hearted friendship and fellowship with God. In 
as far as we are in such fellowship we can believe that 
it applies to us. 

"We can fully believe, then, that God is controlling 
and shaping events with personal reference to our 
individual happiness and well being (Eom. 8 : 28). 
Whether He is doing it by special interpositions or 
doing it inside of and by means of the course of nature 
which He established in the beginning, is a question 
which we do not need to discuss at all. From the 
standpoint of the great evolution system one way 
would be fully as reasonable and justifiable as the 
other. He is doing it in just whichever way His 
wisdom sees fit and convenient in each several case. 

But He is doing it. And He is doing it not for the 
advancement of the world or the success of some good 



104 THE SUPERNATUKAL 

cause, and not necessarily because of the intrinsic value 
of the results secured in all cases. He is doing it solely 
and specifically because He wants to do us kindness 
and wants to make us feel and enjoy His companion- 
ship. All such providences of God are entirely things 
done as acts of fellowship between friend and friend. 



VII 
PKAYER 

CLOSELY allied to the foregoing, we must 
notice that the supernatural in the Bible has 
a most necessary and intimate relation to all 
our Prayer Life. 

Prayer is one of the most fundamental offices of 
religion. We may count it the most essential of them 
all. Where there is prayer there is religion. Where 
there is not prayer or something that is its equivalent, 
there may be excellent ethical culture, sociological 
effort and theological acumen, but there is no re- 
ligion, — at least none in the sense in which we have 
defined the term here of fellowship with God. 

Prayer Implies the Supernatural 
It would not be difficult to show that the reality of 
our prayer life is dependent almost entirely upon a 
feeling which we have derived, consciously or un- 
consciously, from the miracles in the Bible. Prayer 
to God would be meaningless without the belief and 
the feeling that He takes a sympathetic interest in the 
individual and definitely gives him personal and specific 
help. Just to impress that very feeling is the one 
great value of all the miracles to us and really those 
miracles are the only known facts that definitely de- 

105 



106 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

clare that God does give personal interest and help to 
individuals. 

In as far as any prayer consists of petitions or asking 
for things it implicitly expresses a desire that God 
would do something aside from what the ordinary 
course of nature left to itself would effect. Every 
such prayer is therefore really a request to God to 
work a miracle. "We may not expect or call for any 
visible, physical miracle like healing the blind or turn- 
ing water into wine, but a manipulation of purely 
mental and spiritual forces by God for us would be 
just as much an intrusion into natural law and as 
truly working a miracle as multiplying the loaves or 
stilling the tempest. 

It is a naive kind of ignorance to overlook this fact, 
yet we do overlook it, and we have a feeling that it 
would be unscientific to imagine God doing a physical 
miracle in these days but quite legitimate to imagine 
Him doing almost anything in the mental sphere. 
The mental sphere and the physical sphere are both 
equally parts of nature, and equally governed by 
natural law. For God to exert any influence whatever 
in either sphere directly for the personal interests of 
any petitioner would be just as much a supernatural 
event and a miracle as any of those that are recorded 
in the Bible. 

Some people try to avoid this conclusion and still 
retain a province for prayer by saying that God does 
not give any concrete response but we get comfort and 
benefit by the mere seeking for and contemplation of 
His sympathy. But that can only be legitimate if 



PRAYER 107 

God does really give personal sympathy to us indi- 
vidually. If He does not our belief is superstition. If 
He does, there is no difference in principle between 
that and His sending manna from heaven to feed us. 

"We must remember that mind is just as natural and 
integral a part of this universe as matter is. The 
states and interactions of mind are just as much the 
subject of natural law as the activities of oxygen or 
electricity. It would be just as much an irruption into 
the natural working of the system He had made for 
God to give spiritual encouragement and uplift to a 
soul by His personal sympathy as it would be to still 
the winds of Galilee or heal the leper by a touch. 

Even those parts of our prayers that do not consist 
of petitions but merely of thanks, confession or other 
kinds of fellowship, almost equally require the feeling 
that God takes a sympathetic interest in us personally. 
For us to approach God in any personal way implies 
the belief that He may be expected to make an equally 
personal response of some kind, or at least take per- 
sonal, sympathetic notice of us individually. 
(f Thus all our acts of worship of every kind in some 
degree imply the belief of God doing something out- 
side of what is included in what we call nature and 
natural law. 

As Christians we believe that this expectation is well 
founded and that God will do such things. We be- 
lieve that in answer to prayer He will give substantial 
favours, not only sympathy and mental and moral 
help, but actual physical help and favours as well. 
We have gotten this feeling not from philosophy or 



108 THE SUPERNATURAL 

reasoning but from the supernatural acts and super- 
natural teaching contained in the Bible. One great 
value of all the supernatural acts recorded there is 
precisely to impart that idea and make it vivid and 
real to us. 

One of the great values, then, of all these miracles 
recorded in the Bible is to let us see instances of God 
doing things personally for the sake of some individual, 
in order that we may get the vivid feeling that it is 
plausible to expect Him to do such things for us, and 
so our prayers may have reality in them to us. 

Answees to Pkayek 

It ought not to be necessary to pause particularly to 
consider the customary objection that all such answers 
to prayer would be unreasonable, — that it would be 
unreasonable for God to depart from the wise course 
of events He had originally planned and follow some 
other plan that we conceived and requested. Or that 
it would be unreasonable for God to have resort to a 
special act or miracle to bring some good to some one 
whom He wished to favour, when in His wisdom He 
could just as well have planned from the beginning 
for that benefit to come to Him spontaneously and 
naturally. 

This objection quite mistakes the meaning and pur- 
pose of prayer. The purpose of prayer is not to enable 
certain privileged persons to get some special benefits, 
nor to enable them to have the satisfaction of having 
events transpire in accordance with their wisdom and 
their wishes. 



PRAYER 109 

The meaning and the purpose of prayer is fellow- 
ship with God. That is what prayer is. That is its 
main and primary purpose. It is not a means to some- 
thing else, but is itself the end and the desirable object, 
and the benefits given in answer are a means to the 
prayer. It is prayer itself as fellowship with God that 
is the valuable thing which God desired to produce, 
and the promise of good things in answer to the prayers 
is merely a means He employs to induce men to engage 
in the exercise of prayer, that is to say to engage in 
fellowship with Himself. ^. 

Since all prayer to be acceptable must contain the 
provision : " If it be God's will," we might say that the 
only things God may be expected to give in answer to 
prayer are things that He considers to be desirable and 
best, that is to say things that He might otherwise 
have made part of the result that nature would produce 
spontaneously, but in order to induce men to engage in 
the fellowship of prayer He planned that those things 
should be contingent on our making a specific request 
for them. Really both the prayer and the granting 
the thing asked for were contemplated from the be- 
ginning. 

God from the beginning, in planning the course of 
nature, we may conceive, arranged so that certain de- 
sirable things should be held back and not produced 
naturally, in order that He might bestow those things 
personally and specially as a sort of bait to induce men 
to come and enter into personal fellowship with Him 
in the form of prayer. Prayer is not fundamentally a 
means to acquire certain good gifts, but the prayer it- 



110 THE SUPERNATURAL 

self is the thing of chief value, and the good gifts are 
the means to induce us to engage in it, and thus have 
fellowship with God. 

Now in order to have that effect we must really be- 
lieve that God will give personal favours to us per- 
sonally. And as we have seen, the great means to in- 
spire that belief in us is the sight of these instances in 
the Bible where God did give special personal favours 
to individuals. 

Thus we see that the supernatural in the Bible is of 
supreme value to us in that it makes possible to us the 
prayer spirit. It makes valid and reasonable the whole 
institution of prayer, and thus enables us to whole- 
heartedly engage in it, and in so doing we enter into 
the blessedness of fellowship with God, which is the 
very heart and essence of our religious life. 

Intercessory Prayer 

There is another very interesting question connected 
with this subject of prayer. For we will find that even 
the validity and reasonableness of certain kinds of 
prayer is quite dependent upon considerations growing 
out of this matter of our fellowship with God. 

If our conception of the supernatural and of God's 
personal attitude towards us is correct we would be 
able to account for God's giving good gifts as personal 
favours to us in response to our requests. But there 
are certain forms of prayer that still present serious 
difficulties, for instance, "Intercessory Prayer," and 
such petitions as : — " Thy will be done on earth as it is 
in heaven." How can we reasonably petition and ask 



PEAYEE 111 

for something that is not a personal benefit to ourselves 
but merely is for the improvement of the world, for the 
advancement of God's cause or for the help of some 
one whom we pity, — but whom we know God pities 
and wishes to help far more than we do ? 

We are told, for instance, to make intercession in 
prayer for the suffering and needy around us,— to pray 
that God would give them the help that they need. 
Why should we do so ? Does not God know of their 
suffering and need ? Do we need to inform Him ? 

We say we pray because we pity them and therefore 
ask God to help them. But do we have to persuade 
God to help them ? Does He not also pity them far 
more than we do ? Will He not want to give them 
the help without our urging Him to do so ? Are we 
so much better and more sympathetic than God that 
we have to be touched with sympathy first and then 
arouse Him to sympathy and help ? 

We are told to pray for some one in order to bring 
down God's blessing upon him. Why ? Does not God 
love him and want to bless him far more than we do ? 
Why is it necessary for us to pray and urge God to do 
something that He specially wants to do ? 

Especially is this apparent when we pray for the 
conversion of some friend, or pray that he may be kept 
from going into sin. Does not God want him to be 
converted and saved far more than we do ? Did not 
Christ come from heaven and give His life that that 
man might be saved ? If God can do anything more 
to insure his being saved will He not surely do it ? 
Why will He be any more apt to do it after we have 



112 THE SUPERNATURAL 

asked Him than before ? Why should He wait for us 
to ask Him to do something to effect a result that from 
the beginning He greatly desired and which He has 
already shown the intensity of His desire for by the 
very great work and suffering already gone through to 
effect it ? If there is anything more He can do will 
He not certainly do it without our asking, and if 
there is nothing more He can do why should we ask 
Him? 

Or perhaps we can present the difficulty in another 
way by asking : — How can we justify God holding 
back and not doing certain good things which He 
might do, and which would produce good results in ac- 
cord with His purposes ? 

For instance, our Christian teaching represents God 
as desiring the salvation of men, planning for it and 
going to infinite expense to make it possible. A little 
special work of His Holy Spirit at a certain time would 
accomplish the desired result with any given man and 
bring him to salvation. But God declines to do that 
little work, we are told, till some one prays and asks 
Him to do it. 

After having already done so infinitely much to ac- 
complish the result He declines to do the one little 
thing that will make it all effective until some man 
prays and asks Him to do it, then He does it. In the 
case of unnumbered thousands He does not do it at all 
just because no one has asked Him specifically to do it, 
and so all His great past work goes for naught. 

Does not this tend to reduce the whole matter to 
merely a sort of stage play ? Is not this whole con- 



PRAYER 113 

eeption a mistake, and is not all such prayer unneces- 
sary because God will, without our urging, do all that 
He can do for the salvation of all men ? 

One of the most common petitions in public prayer 
is for the success of Missions and the conversion of the 
world. But how can we reasonably justify a man 
making such a request ? That was the great object 
on Christ's heart in coming into the world. God de- 
sires that far more than we do. Is it not impertinence 
for us to urge Him to do something for it ? 

If we were personally engaged in that foreign mis- 
sion work we perhaps might reasonably ask Him to 
bless our own work and make it successful. But when 
we ask for the whole work in all the world, with a 
very large part of that work we have not even a re- 
mote connection. How then can we without imperti- 
nence make a request to God that He would work 
faster in that work and more quickly finish it ? He is 
interested in the hastening of it a hundred times more 
than we are. He cares for the welfare of these perish- 
ing people a hundred times more than we do. If there 
is anything He can do to hasten their conversion and 
salvation will He not certainly do it ? If He cannot 
do anything more than He is doing why should we 
keep asking Him to do more ? 

Our Prayer Makes the Thing Possible 
for God to Do 

The logic of that reply is correct. We must believe 
that God cannot do any more for the salvation of the 
world, or of any individual, than He is already doing. 



114 THE SUPERNATURAL 

To doubt that would be to doubt the " God so loved 
the world." 

We cannot ask Hiin to do anything more than He 
is doing except on one certain condition. We cannot 
ask Him to do anything more in the matter unless the 
very fact of our ashing Him will maJce it possible for 
Him to do something He could not othemoise do. That 
is a startling proposition to make but it is a proposition 
we cannot avoid if we candidly face all the facts we 
are taught about God's love and relation to men. God 
cannot do certain things without our prayer, and He 
can do them after we have prayed for them. How 
can this be possible ? 

We sometimes use this form of words meaning it 
merely in a hortatory sense. We mean merely that God 
wants us to make the request and is voluntarily delay- 
ing the gift or act until we do make it. But this must 
mean very much more than that. For it must be that 
He not only tentatively delays doing the things in 
question but that He actually cannot do them. 

Here during the past nineteen centuries more than 
fifty generations of men have gone down to death 
without certain help that we ask God now to give. 
Loving them deeply, that He did not give them that 
help at any time must surely have been because He 
could not. He would have given it if He could. We 
cannot think He delayed giving it and let them all 
go down to death just to hold up a little inducement 
to-day to our prayer spirit. That would make the 
whole matter monstrous. 

We must either believe that there is nothing more 



PRAYER 115 

possible for God to do for men's salvation, or for any 
good cause, and so our praying for it is vain and un- 
reasonable, or we must believe that our praying for a 
thing may make it possible for God to do something 
that it was not possible for Him to do before. How 
can such a thing be ? 

We must turn to science for the solution of this 
fundamental enigma of prayer. 

Immutability op Natueal Law 
The one thing that science most insistently teaches 
us is the immutability of natural law. Science asserts 
this as an empirical induction, and philosophy and 
theology put the same truth on the firm foundation of 
God's infinite knowledge and competence. God knew 
what the world would become when He created and 
constituted all things, so He did it knowingly. If He 
had wanted anything to be different He could and 
would have made provision for it at that time. Hav- 
ing made what He wanted to make He has no inclina- 
tion or design to interfere to change any part of its 
working. The great system of natural law is the 
system God ordained for this world. It is His will 
that that system should have unhindered right of way. 
True this view leaves many problems difficult to 
reconcile. There is evil in the world and suffering 
and failure. There are many things we wish were 
different and much we long to see improved. Still 
perhaps if we had infinite wisdom we might be able 
to see that the world, on the whole and in connection 
with the interests of the whole universe, is really being 



116 THE SUPEBNATUKAL 

conducted in the best possible manner after all. Or 
we might see that for God to interfere for the purpose 
of changing His original plan or making anything work 
differently from what the original plan would effect, 
would be the cause of far more evil than the good pro- 
duced. 

But whether we can fully explain and justify it or 
not, the fact remains. Natural law is of God and He 
respects it. He ordained the world to be governed by 
the system of natural law which He constituted for it, 
and He will never discredit or repudiate that first ar- 
rangement which He ordained. 

We must accept, then, fully and absolutely this teach- 
ing of both science and theology, that the laws of na- 
ture are inviolable, — that God never will intrude or 
interfere directly for the purpose of doing anything for 
the bettering of the world, since that is the province of 
those laws. And to say that He will not is the same 
as saying He cannot. That motive and purpose can 
never lead Him to do any present special and personal 
or supernatural act. 

This is the only tenable ground on which we can 
stand with regard to God as the creator and governor 
of the world. And it is precisely from that standpoint 
that we first become able to understand the need and 
the legitimacy of intercessory prayer. From that 
standpoint it all becomes quite plain and logical. 

From that standpoint we can see on the one hand 
why it is that God does not do various things to insure 
the improvement of certain people. He will not inter- 
fere with the world that He has made. It is the set/ 



PEAYEE 117 

tied determination of His will that nature, — the world 
as He constituted it, — must run its course unhelped and 
uninterfered with. God never will do anything special 
for the purpose of making the world or any person bet- 
ter. To do so would be just as contrary to His fixed 
purpose as to arbitrarily change the orbit of a sun or 
blot out a world and make it over again. We can 
thus see that God cannot normally do any of these 
things that we are asking Him to do in intercessory 
prayer. 

The question then to solve is : — How is it possible for 
Him on the other hand to do them after we have 
prayed for them if it was impossible for Him to do 
them before ? The answer to this lies right along the 
line of this one great topic which we have been dis- 
cussing. 

Doing a Thing Asked for Becomes a Matter 
of Fellowship 

We have seen that God does do special acts as acts 
of fellowship. He will do special acts for the sake of 
kindness or fellowship with some man, though He 
never would do such acts for a merely utilitarian pur- 
pose. Here is a project, let us suppose, that would re- 
quire a special act of God. Merely for utilitarian 
reasons He never would set aside natural law and do 
that act. But some friend of God asks Him to do that 
act as a favour to him because it will give him happi- 
ness. It has now become a matter of personal favour 
and fellowship between God and that man. So God 
does that act as an act of favour and fellowship to that 



118 THE SUPEKNATUKAL 

man. He does not do it to make the world better or 
for any utilitarian benefit but solely to give pleasure 
and show friendship to that man, His friend, even 
though it does incidentally serve some utilitarian pur- 
pose. 

Fellowship with men is a motive for which God con- 
siders it proper to do special acts. As we have seen, 
that is one of the distinct designs of God, looked for- 
ward to and prepared for by all nature and the evolu- 
tion process. God might do from that motive acts 
whose results or by-products would make the world 
better, even though He never would have done those 
acts merely to make the world better as their main 
purpose. He could do acts if they were done as acts 
of fellowship which He never would have done for any 
other reason. 

Answer to prayer is an act of fellowship, and there- 
fore it is a motive for which God would consider it 
proper and possible to do special acts. God might, for 
the purpose of answering the prayers of persons that 
were living in close fellowship with Him, do any act 
He chose, because it would be an act of fellowship. 
The act might make the world better or convert some 
man, but yet it is not done primarily for that purpose. 
It is done as an act of fellowship to the man who re- 
quested it, to show kindness to him and make him feel 
that God is his friend. That is its main purpose, and 
the benefit to the world or to the other individual is 
merely a by-product or secondary result. 

Of course the only sense in which we could say that 
God could not do any act would be the sense that there 



PEAYEE 119 

was no adequate motive for doing it. The motive to 
make the world better would not be a legitimate one 
that could apply at all. Doing a special act primarily 
for that purpose is not in accordance with His will. 
But if doing a certain act would become an act of fel- 
lowship to some man then that would be a legitimate 
motive to do that act, and God could do it where He 
could not do it before. He might freely do from one 
motive an act which He would not do from another 
motive. The act acquires a different character. It be- 
comes a different matter with quite different implica- 
tions. 

To make a very humble analogy : — A sick nurse on 
duty must not for her own pleasure spend her time 
playing games or driving in the park. But if it were 
done for the benefit of her convalescing patient then it 
would be quite proper for her to do it, even though she 
herself also would get pleasure from it. 

Just so the exigencies of the world's progress might 
seem to call upon God to do certain things. But He 
could not comply and do them for that purpose any 
more than the nurse might play to amuse herself. It 
would be contrary to established law to do so, — in both 
cases alike. But suppose a man in close, loving fellow- 
ship with God asks Him to do those same things as a 
favour to him because it would give him pleasure. 
The fact of this man having asked in that way makes 
the doing of those things a matter of kindness and fel- 
lowship with him. God therefore might freely do 
those things for that purpose, even though it did bring 
the result that the exigencies of the world's progress 



120 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

called for and though He could not do them primarily 
for the world's progress. 

Yery possibly all the above may seem to some to be 
merely a piece of speculation and casuistry. Still as 
long as opponents insist on making these speculative 
objections to prayer it is well to be able to meet them 
and show that we are logical and sound. It is plain 
that in this way we do have a complete and satisfactory 
answer to this problem of intercessory prayer. We 
can see how it is not merely a figure of speech but a 
real fact that there are things which God cannot do 
before we have prayed for them which He can do when 
we have asked Him to do them, and our praying for 
them actually enables Him to do them. Our praying 
for a certain thing makes God's doing that thing 
become a favour to us. It makes it become an act of 
fellowship, for it is an answer to a request, and thus is 
a purely fellowship act. God can do that thing as an 
act of fellowship, though He could not have done it 
otherwise. 

Of course it is quite possible in fellowship to do 
favours that have not been specifically asked for. Yet 
they must be things that are specifically desired or 
they are not favours and it is not fellowship. All our 
desires should be lifted up to God in the form of 
requests and petitions. That is God's design in the 
whole institution of prayer, and we are explicitly 
directed to do so (cf . Phil. 4 : 6, etc.). And so it is quite 
logical if He should have it fixed that the favour 
would not be granted till the request was actually 
made. 



PEAYEE 121 

Illustrations 

We may illustrate the matter with some concrete 
examples. A ship is in a great storm on the Mediter- 
ranean Sea (Acts 27 : 14 ff .). In the ship are two hun- 
dred and seventy-five men, paralyzed with fear and 
looking for certain death. God knows their danger 
and terror, and He pities them. He has also known of 
countless other cases of terror and suffering both before 
and since then, which He did not help. He has pitied 
them and suffered in sympathy with all these sufferers, 
but by the wise determination of His own will He has 
made it impossible for Himself to in any way intervene 
for their relief. He counts it necessary that nature 
should freely run its course, and so He has had to leave 
them all to the free operations of nature. 

But there was one man in that ship, the Apostle Paul, 
who had long been in a relation of intimate personal 
fellowship with God. Paul, with the confidence of a 
friend, was asking and looking to God for the safety of 
his life, and also for the safety of all these others " that 
journeyed with him." 

This made the matter of saving the people in that 
ship a matter of personal favour to Paul, God's friend. 
It was now no longer a matter of interfering with 
natural law to save some lives, but a matter of fellow- 
ship with a friend, which is emphatically in accord 
with natural law. And so God could and did do it. 
He did it for Paul's sake, not for the sake of the two 
hundred and seventy-five others. He did it to be 
friendly to Paul, not primarily to save their lives, 
though it did save their lives. 



122 THE SUPERNATURAL 

King Hezekiah was attacked in his capital city Jeru- 
salem (2 Kings 18 : 13-19: 35) The mighty Assyrian 
army was near at hand, both able and eager to destroy 
the city and forever blot out the Jewish nation as it 
already had the tribes of Israel to the north. 

The nation of the Jews has played an important part 
in the history of civilization, and their destruction at 
this time might have delayed for centuries the progress 
of the world. But we cannot conceive of God on that 
account intervening to save the nation, and for that 
reason. It would be violating natural law. To do 
so would be to confess incompetency in His original 
constitution of things, and to admit that He had not 
been able to arrange for progress to go on spontane- 
ously quite as fast as He would like to have it. 

But there was another factor in the situation. 
Hezekiah had been for a long while walking in spe- 
cially loyal, trustful fellowship with God. It was 
entirely in accord with both the great world plan and 
God's will for God to carry on the fellowship with 
Hezekiah by granting him favours that he asked. 
Hezekiah asked for deliverance from this enemy, and 
God granted it to him as & favour to him. Thereby the 
nation of the Jews with its enormous value for the 
world's betterment was preserved though that was only 
a by-product. 

Doubtless Hezekiah's motives were not altogether 
selfish. He may have desired the deliverance not 
altogether or chiefly for his own safety. He may 
have loved his nation and desired to see it safe. He 
may have foreseen how much his nation would con- 



PRAYER 123 

tribute to the progress of the world and have desired 
that. These and other things may have entered into 
the cause of his desire, but it was his desire, and God 
granted it, not because of the benefit to the nation or 
to the world, but because it was the request and desire 
of Hezekiah, His friend. 

That is the only reason that could justify God inter- 
fering by such a personal interposition. For we are 
assuming for the sake of the illustration that it was a 
supernatural or personal interposition of God that 
brought the deliverance in both these cases. He sent 
the special deliverance solely because it was the request 
and desire of His friend, and He could not have done it 
otherwise. 

Let us again suppose, for instance, that the vast and 
venerable nation of China were in the throes of a great 
agitation. Will it issue in disaster or in reformation 
and advancement ? The question comes up of praying 
to God to exert influence to avoid disaster and lead to 
good results. If God were to specially exert some 
influence upon the minds of certain men or do some 
other special thing, the disaster would be averted and 
good results ensue. 

But without our prayer or any other consideration 
to justify it, it would be unreasonable to suppose that 
God would ever do a special act for that purpose. It 
would be interfering with natural law. The great 
nation of China was moving and would move just as 
He in the beginning had provided that it should move. 
To interfere by a special act now to improve something 
or prevent some result that would have naturally en- 



124 THE SUPEKNATUBAL 

sued would be to declare His first provision inade- 
quate. 

But you have desired and prayed to God for the sal- 
vation of China. Simply as an act of favour to you 
He might legitimately do the thing that would turn 
the tide towards China's uplift, just as He might do 
any other thing you desired as an act of favour to you. 
It would all be purely a personal matter of favour to you. 

Whether so great an act as that would not be quite 
out of proportion to your importance and unseemly 
as a favour to you, is another question. But if God 
thought it a suitable favour to give to you it would be 
entirely in accord with His established ways of work- 
ing to do so. 

As an act of fellowship and favour to you He might 
comfort your mind, He might cure your sickness, He 
might make your enterprises prosperous. All these 
would be recognized as appropriate acts of favour to 
be granted for fellowship's sake. And equally as a 
favour to you, if you desired it and it would be a real 
favour to you, He might bring influences to bear that 
would result in the conversion of your friend, the 
uplift of your community, the salvation of China, or 
any other good thing whatsoever, — only provided it 
was a thing you desired and the doing of it would be a 
specific favour to you. 

That He should do such things merely to make the 
world better, because it was not getting better as fast 
as He wished, would be unreasonable, and would stamp 
His original creation act as inadequate. But that He 
should do any kind of personal favours for fellowship's 



PEAYEE 125 

sake is an entirely different thing. It is no reflection 
on the adequacy of the original creation for Him to do 
any kind of favours whatsoever as favours. This was 
contemplated and provided for in that original creation 
system, — indeed we might almost say it was one of the 
main purposes of that creation. 

Thus we see that prayer is a reality. It is a real 
power. It is not merely a ceremony pleasing to God, 
a spiritual exercise, a devotion. It is one of the real 
powers and efficiencies of the universe, just as much so 
as electricity or gravitation. It is something that has 
power to bring about results that could not have come 
about without it any more than planets could revolve 
without gravitation or flowers bloom without sunlight. 
It is in fact, as it has often been called, a lever that can 
move the world, for it can enlist and open the way for 
the infinite power of God. 

Not the new, attenuated definition of Spiritual Calis- 
thenics, but the old conception of "Wrestling with 
God " is the definition of prayer that most nearly fills 
the requirements of our modern science. 

Laws op Pkayer 

If this is the meaning and the value of prayer we 
can determine to some extent the laws that will govern 
the answers to prayer. The whole matter must be 
subject to the laws that apply to ordinary friendly fel- 
lowship. 

With one of the parties to the friendship so infinitely 
great it may seem venturesome to compare it with our 
ordinary friendships, and yet what God does is per- 



126 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

feet, — perfect in its minuteness as well as in its com- 
pleteness. If He deigns to grant friendship and fellow- 
ship at all we may be sure it will be in no way less 
companionable and sincere than the most perfect of our 
human friendships and fellowships. 

We are considering now only the granting of favours 
for fellowship's sake. In the first place the prayer must 
be a sincere expression of a real desire, or there is no 
reason at all to expect the request to be granted and the 
thing given. When friend talks with friend we often in 
ordinary fellowship say a great many things merely for 
form's sake, for politeness and because it is customary 
to say or ask those things under the circumstances. If 
the friend is accustomed to the ways of the world he 
understands that perfectly, and pays no particular at- 
tention to those requests, except to count them at their 
true value as merely polite talk. 

A pretty large part of the prayers of all Christians 
can be blocked out entirely under that head. Doubt- 
less God is not offended but possibly pleased to have us 
be polite towards Him and say or ask things just to be 
social. But we surely must concede Him as much dis- 
crimination as our ordinary friends have. 

We may fix, then, as the first rule, that the value of 
any petition to bring an answering favour depends in 
the first place on the strength of the real desire for that 
specific thing. If you pray for the reformation of 
China or the conversion of your friend, the only effi- 
ciency in your petition will grow out of the amount of 
real desire in your heart for those objects. 

It will not be governed by the fervency or the ur- 



PRAYER 127 

gency with which you make the petition. It will not 
be governed by the intrinsic goodness and desirableness 
of the thing asked for. The only factor that will have 
value will be the degree of desire you have for that 
thing, — the degree in which its granting would be a 
personal favour to you. 

It may be that the reformation of China would be a 
grand good thing and would bring benefit and happi- 
ness to millions of people. But you have no right to 
advise God to do it on that account. But if it will give 
real pleasure to you personally, then, because God is 
your friend you can frankly and confidingly ask Him 
to bring it about, and just in the degree that it will 
cause you personally real happiness He will be disposed 
to do it in response to your request. 

Of course we suppose it gives you pleasure because 
of the pleasure and happiness it would give to these 
millions of other people, and your heart goes out in 
sympathy to them. But we need not go into that 
phase of the question now. The point is that all the 
value your prayer has in the case is the amount of 
personal favour the result would be to you, for what- 
ever God does in the matter in answer He is going to 
do solely as a favour to you. 

This seems an extremely strange statement to make, 
but we have seen that there is no other ground on 
which God could do such things without throwing dis- 
credit on His original creation. He could only do 
such things on the ground of friendship and fellowship 
for some one. 

The second rule is that God will act in the case in 



128 THE SUPERNATURAL 

the capacity of Friend, not of servant or agent or in- 
strument or anything of that kind. When friend 
makes a request of friend that friend is entirely free 
as to whether he shall grant it or not, otherwise it is 
not a matter of friendship but something else. But on 
the other hand the whole force of his friendship will 
impel him to do that thing as far as it is feasible. 
And just in proportion to the strength of the friend- 
ship between the two persons will the request be 
likely to be granted, other things being equal. 

So on the one hand it will be no reflection on the 
validity of prayer if the requests are not granted in 
any case or in any number of cases, even cases that 
seem in the highest degree deserving. For the friend 
must be entirely free if it is to be really an act of 
friendship. 

But on the other hand the whole force of the bond 
of friendship between us and God will impel Him to 
do the thing desired. And we may assume that the 
more strong and intimate that bond of friendship be- 
comes the more result there will be from our prayers. 
The efficiency of our prayers will not be measured by 
such things as our ability and earnestness in service or 
even our holiness, except as they are an index of the 
strength of our personal bond of friendship with God. 



VIII 

PUNISHMENT 

WHAT about the severe and sterner parts of 
the Bible ? There are many cases of threat- 
ening, punishment and destruction recorded 
there, especially in the Old Testament. If we claim 
that the supernatural and all the movement of the 
Bible is an enterprise by God to draw men into fellow- 
ship with Himself by giving friendly, companionable 
treatment to them, does not this contradict that claim ? 
Fellowship should consist on His part in favours, friendly 
companior iliip and conversation. Sending suffering, 
punishment and destruction seems more like the office 
of a stern judge and moral ruler. Is not that the atti- 
tude in which God most characteristically stands, at 
least in the Old Testament ? 

Certainly that seems to be the popular impression 
and men contrast the loving Saviour of the New Testa- 
ment with the stern, just judge and sovereign ruler, 
God, of the Old Testament. Even though they con- 
sider it all the same God, and the representations con- 
sistent, they consider that the New Testament is in- 
tended to exhibit the loving, forgiving side of His nature, 
and the specific province of the Old Testament was to 
prepare us for this by first teaching us His inflexible 
justice, wrath and punishment of sin. 

129 



130 THE SUPEBNATUKAL 

But we are assuming here that religion is fellowship 
with God, and that all God's movements of a personal 
nature recorded in the Bible have that for their object, 
namely, to win men into fellowship. The purpose to 
give fellowship is the only motive that could justify 
supernatural or personal acts and teaching. All the 
supernatural acts and teaching of God in the Bible, 
then, must be done as acts of fellowship. 

Here seems to be a contradiction. How are we to 
reconcile these two conceptions ? Or is that popular 
conception really a mistaken one ? Is it possible that 
we may find that after all the movement of God in the 
Old Testament no less than in the "New is a movement 
entirely of favour, kindness and helpfulness, and all of 
it such that it can be properly considered a contribution 
of Divine Fellowship ? 

Manufactuee and Use 

In order to determine this question we must take a 
somewhat broad and analytic view of God's various 
kinds of activities. 

We say that evolution and nature is all ultimately 
God's activity. It is His activity as Creator. It is 
His enterprise of making things. It is His great 
manufactory in which He is manufacturing all things, 
including man. This is God's process of manufac- 
turing man. Now we shall see presently that all pun- 
ishment belongs in and is part of this manufacturing 
process. 

But things are usually manufactured to be used. 
God manufactured man to use him, and one main use 



PUNISHMENT 131 

was for the purpose of engaging in fellowship with 
him. The manufacturing and the using are two dis- 
tinct things. The manufacturing is ordinary nature. 
The using is fellowship, and includes all the super- 
natural of the Bible. It is religion. 

It may be the same person that manufactures that 
also uses. Also He may begin to use the thing before 
the manufacturing process is entirely completed. But 
yet the manufacturing and the using are clearly dis- 
tinct things. We must consider them just as separate 
as though it was a different person using the thing from 
the person who was manufacturing it. 

If we will keep this distinction clearly in mind the 
whole matter will clear itself up. For we will find that 
the great bulk of the punishments and judgments por- 
trayed in the Old Testament are not things that are a 
part of the fellowship movement at all. They are not 
supernatural facts or supernatural acts. They are things 
that came about in the natural way by natural law. 
They are merely facts predicted or referred to in God's 
conversations or messages, just as He might refer to 
any other conspicuous and important things. 

Eeally in these stern severe incidents the supernat- 
ural feature is merely the fact of God giving the con- 
versations and messages, — the fact of His speaking to 
men about these things. That is distinctly a matter 
of kindness and friendliness. That is an appropriate 
method of fellowship, even though the things thus 
supernaturally spoken of may be severe and painful 
facts. 

These severe and painful things spoken of are not 



132 THE SUPEENATUKAL 

themselves parts of the fellowship. They are merely 
the subjects of the conversation. In themselves they 
are part of the manufacturing process. They belong 
to that department of God's activity. For they are 
things which when they do take place take place en- 
tirely by the course of natural law. 

In the few cases where a punishment did come by a 
supernatural act we shall see that really some other 
purpose was the main, fundamental motive of the act, 
and the punishment was merely a means to effect that 
purpose, or a result from it (cf. Chapter VIII, pp. 258 ff.). 

Punishment All Belongs to Natukal Law 

This manufacturing process, commonly called na- 
ture or evolution, is strictly and essentially a reign of 
law. Law is one of the most important features of its 
apparatus. In the mechanical and chemical sphere the 
law is compulsory and effectively produces the results. 
In the sphere of life, which in its very essence implies 
some degree of free will, law does not absolutely com- 
pel, but visits some evil on the individual that does not 
conform. This is equally true of all the various func- 
tions of life, — the merely physical ones such as growth, 
reproduction and action, also the mental ones such as 
memory, reason, invention, as well as the sphere of 
ethics, character and duty. In this last sphere we call 
it punishment. 

All this reign of law is part of the order of things 
established and provided for in the first institution of 
nature at creation. It is all provided for in the one 
great manufacturing system that punishment or penalty 



PUNISHMENT 133 

must follow everything that is not according to the 
law's standard. In all the greater part of the process 
we can see that the penalty automatically follows the 
collision with the law. We can see this in the physical 
sphere, the natural mental sphere, and to some extent 
we can see it in the ethical sphere also. 

It is true that to a certain extent in the ethical 
sphere it is not so apparent. We cannot so clearly see 
that punishment there always automatically follows 
breach of law. And yet we feel compelled to believe 
that in some way it does do so, and that it must all be 
as fully and as naturally provided for there as else- 
where. The punishment in this sphere as in all the 
others is intrinsically a part of the apparatus of the 
manufacturing process, for its purpose is the elevation 
and discipline of character. We feel that certainly not 
some but all of that apparatus must have been provided 
for along with everything else necessary, in instituting 
the great evolution process. It is hard to believe that 
there should have been some little minor inadequacy 
that had to be personally provided for from time to 
time. 

In saying this we do not mean at all to imply that 
the punishment of sin must necessarily and always be 
an automatic result of the sin itself. It may or may not 
be so. It may be a distinct volition and impulse of 
God at the time for each person. But for all we 
know gravitation or electricity may be so too, — a dis- 
tinct volition and present impulse of God in every case 
of activity. There are some theorists that claim that 
it is. We know nothing whatever on that subject. 



134 THE SUPERNATURAL 

We must leave that phase entirely out of our consider- 
ation. 

What we must believe, however, is that God in the 
beginning instituted a great manufacturing system 
complete in every respect, with full and appropriate 
provision so that suns should attract each other, elec- 
tricity should flow, and sin should be followed by pun- 
ishment. It was all equally and fully arranged and 
provided for some way from the beginning as all one 
unified system. It was the one fully endowed manu- 
factory and this is all the process of manufacture. 

If then this is the manufacturing process and all fully 
provided for, we cannot conceive of God doing any 
present supernatural act primarily for its sake. Just as 
we cannot conceive of God doing a supernatural act 
primarily for the purpose of teaching or improving the 
world, so equally we cannot conceive of His doing a 
supernatural act primarily for the purpose of punishing, 
for that too is part of the manufacturing process which 
He provided fully for by natural law. All punishment 
must find its means within the evolution system, in nat- 
ural law. Any supernatural act by God primarily for 
the purpose of punishment would therefore be excluded. 
If we should find any such acts in the Bible we must 
frankly say we do not know any way to justify or ac- 
count for them. 

But is this so ? Is infliction of punishment, then, no 
part of religion ? Is it true that supernatural acts in 
the Bible were never performed for the sake of punish- 
ment ? Doubtless this is quite the opposite of the pop- 
ular conception on the subject. It seems to be a very 



PUOTSHMENT 135 

common popular conception that punishment is one of 
the most prominent and fundamental factors of the 
Christian religion. 

It must be admitted that it has been so used in the 
past by Christian teachers. The doctrine of future 
punishment has been much used as a compelling in- 
centive to lead men to a religious life. Much of the re- 
volt against religion in recent years has really grown 
out of a revolt against this supposed feature of it. The 
antagonism has been largely aroused by this doctrine 
and its supposed implications. 

In many minds there has seemed almost to be the 
crude conception that God had specially organized all 
this system of future punishment directly to force men 
to accept a position of submission to Him, and to coerce 
them into offering Him the worship which He desired 
to receive. This was what the whole system of religion 
seemed to be in their minds, and they rebelled against it. 

In more educated circles the revolt took the form of 
an entire denial of the reality of future punishment. 
Unfortunately for this view it is contrary to the anal- 
ogy of all nature. There is nothing in nature or evolu- 
tion that gives any ground of hope for a future life of 
glory and happiness for all men irrespective of charac- 
ter and conduct. The whole lesson of evolution would 
be that if such a destiny were to be experienced it could 
only be for a selected special part of the race. And as 
far as it would give any indication at all it would be 
that the reprobation of the remainder would be final. 
That is the analogy of all the rest of the evolution 
process. 



136 THE SUPERNATURAL 

But to say that punishment and future reprobation 
is a fact is far from saying that it is a factor of religion. 
It is a fact of nature^ just like fire or poison or storms 
or death. And God's attitude in religion towards it is 
precisely the same as towards any one of these others. 
The fact that in the Bible, even in God's supernatural 
messages, there is much said about it does not alter the 
fact that it belongs distinctly to nature. In the super- 
natural ministry of Jesus there was much connection 
with disease, disaster and death, but that does not alter 
the fact that disease, disaster and death belong wholly 
to natural law. 

The relation of God in religion and in the Bible 
movement towards punishment is precisely the same as 
that of Jesus towards disease. He warns against pun- 
ishment that is impending and does much to ward it 
off, but the punishment itself is entirely a matter of 
natural law, and belongs wholly in the one great evo- 
lution system of nature. 

Punishment Only a By-Product in the 
Supernatural 

The infliction of punishment is no part of religion, 
and God will never do a supernatural act primarily 
for the infliction of punishment. But on the other 
hand, this would not necessarily mean that God might 
not do something for some other purpose which would 
incidentally entail suffering or loss upon some man, 
even in such a form that it might properly be rated as 
punishment. 

For instance He might wish to befriend His friend 



PUNISHMENT 137 

and deliver him from danger, and He could best do it 
by destroying the enemy that was threatening him. 
This would be primarily an act of friendship and there- 
fore of fellowship, even though it did inflict great suf- 
fering, and even though it inflicted the suffering on bad 
men in such a way that it might be rated as punish- 
ment for their sins. The act of friendliness was the 
primary purpose in the case, and that would be an act 
of fellowship. 

In the second place, fellowship implies conversation 
and commerce of ideas. We certainly expect that the 
conversation of God will be something profitable. Thus 
we are prepared for all lands of profitable teaching and 
communications, provided only the primary motive and 
purpose is the fellowship, — is to do kindness and give 
help thereby. This would cover all cases of warning 
and threatening of punishment by the prophets and 
others. It would account for by far the largest part of 
all the references to punishment and severity in the 
Book. And if all punishment is a part of natural law 
it is just as much an act of kindness to warn of that as 
to warn of fire, flood or any other great natural calam- 
ity that might be impending. 

Again, the most efficient way to give the warning 
may be, not by words but by giving some example of 
the calamity actually consummated or of the punish- 
ment actually inflicted. This would open the way to 
account for any instances in the Bible where a super- 
natural punishment was inflicted on any one for a 
warning, as, for instance, in the case of Uzzah (2 Sam. 
6 : 7), or of ISTadab and Abihu (Lev. 10 : 1, 2). In these 



138 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

the primary purpose was the warning to others and not 
the punishment to these men. 

Instances of this class, however, will be found to be 
very few. In most cases where a punishment is held 
up as a warning, the punishment itself is something 
that comes by natural means, in the course of nature, 
and it is only God's foretelling and warning about it 
that is supernatural. Conspicuous examples of this 
would be the Deluge (Gen. 7 and 8), a familiar geo- 
logical phenomenon, and the destruction of Sodom by 
a seismic eruption (Gen. 19 : 24-28). The only super- 
natural parts were God's foretelling and His helping 
His loyal friends to escape. Of the same character, 
also, are all the many calamities and sufferings re- 
corded to have come upon the nation of Israel and on 
various individuals on account of their sins and in ac- 
cordance with God's warnings. It is all natural pun- 
ishment supernaturally foretold. 

It will be found that the principles above stated 
cover all the cases where punishment is associated with 
the supernatural in the Bible. Either (1) the main pur- 
pose of the act was kindness and help to some one, and 
the suffering or punishment inflicted merely as a means 
to that or a result from it, or (2) the punishment was 
sent as a salutary warning, or (3) in far the greatest 
number of cases the supernatural part is merely the 
warning and foretelling of the punishment, and the 
punishment itself is, like all ordinary punishments, en- 
tirely produced by natural causes under natural law. 
Thus in all these cases the supernatural part has en- 
tirely for its object some kind of helpfulness and friend- 



PUNISHMENT 139 

liness to persons on whom God is thereby intending to 
bestow friendship and fellowship. It is therefore an 
appropriate method of God's bestowing fellowship 
upon men. We are correct therefore in still claiming 
that all God's supernatural acts were done for the pur- 
pose of helpfulness, friendship and fellowship. 

Punishment by God 

But after all does not the Bible teach that it is God 
who sends the punishment? — That God is the moral 
governor and judge, and that He will punish sin? 
Does it not teach that He will punish and destroy 
wicked men ? 

Certainly it does, and that is a very important part 
of its teaching. It is a fact that God is the moral 
governor and will punish sin, just as it is a fact that 
God is the creator and has arranged so that every one 
that goes into the fire will be burned, and every one 
who falls from a high place will be bruised. These 
are all equally and alike facts, but they all alike belong 
in the sphere of nature, of evolution, of God's great 
enterprise of making and perfecting the world. They 
all alike belong in the " Manufacturing Department." 

We are not at all implying here that law, judgment 
and punishment are not facts, and like all other facts 
the work of God the creator and moral governor. 
They are extremely important facts, and facts that 
bulk large in the communications or conversations that 
God has with men. We may freely admit that a very 
considerable part of the Bible is taken up with im- 
pressing this fact that God as moral governor will 



140 THE SUPEBNATUBAL 

punish sin and destroy the wicked. That is a fact just 
as true as that " He maketh his sun to rise on the evil 
and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the 
unjust." And it is a fact of essentially the same char- 
acter and in the same department of His work. 

But even though all these things are truly the work 
of God, yet what we are insisting on here is that they 
all belong to one certain department of His work, — the 
manufacturing department, — and God has another 
enterprise and another relation to men besides this 
relation of manufacturer, ruler and judge. He has a 
relation of fellowship and companionable intercourse 
and all His supernatural acts belong to that relation. 
It is this relation and enterprise exclusively that is the 
purpose of the Bible record and that constitutes re- 
ligion. All that He does of a personal or supernatural 
character as recorded there was done in pursuance of 
that enterprise and for fellowship's sake. 

Whatever may have been the subjects of His con- 
versations through the prophets, the conversations 
themselves were carried on solely as a matter of help- 
fulness, fellowship and friendly good will. And it is 
the fact of these conversations being held, not the 
things talked about, that is the thing that may prop- 
erly be rated as supernatural, and that is the thing 
that is a contribution to religion. 

Punishment, therefore, does not ever figure as the 
primary purpose of God in any supernatural act re- 
corded in the Bible. All the supernatural acts in 
which God personally does something to specific men 
have definitely for their main purpose some kindness 



PUNISHMENT 141 

or benefit. We can therefore still feel confidence in 
asserting that the whole Bible movement, Old Testa- 
ment as well as New, — the whole religious propaganda, 
— is a movement of fellowship designed to draw men 
into a state of friendship and fellowship with God. 

It may be that the subject of Punishment is more 
frequently broached in the Old Testament and that the 
New Testament moves mostly in a more benignant 
atmosphere. For the New Testament is the Gospel of 
the Kingdom of Heaven, and its theme is to portray 
the ideal relations between God and men appropriate 
to that higher life ; while the Old Testament has the 
more homely task of letting us see God taking men as 
they are and trying to enter into helpful relations with 
them. But the heart of God is the same in both cases. 
In spite of all the sin, stubbornness and desert of punish- 
ment which that Old Testament finds among men God 
still continues steadfast in His yearning kindness and 
friendship towards them. That is the Gospel of the 
Old Testament, and is it not a gospel that is still needed 
by the world to-day ? 



IX 

GENESIS OF CHRISTIANITY 

WHAT about the claim that all religions, in- 
cluding Christianity, have had a natural 
genesis in the ordinary evolution process, 
and there is no difference between Christianity and the 
others in that respect ? that it must be considered on 
the same plane as all the other ethnic religions ? 

We have seen that fellowship of men with God 
seems to have been one of the great goals of the evolu- 
tion progress, and so in that sense our Christianity as 
well as everything of that nature in all religions has an 
integral place in the evolution system, as has been al- 
ready pointed out. But something more and different 
from that is involved in this claim. 

It is claimed that the origin and genesis of all re- 
ligions, like that of all other mental disciplines, is 
simply the mind of man reacting on the facts of ex- 
perience and observation. The beliefs of religion are 
merely the deductions or inferences that men have 
gradually made from things observed and experienced, 
and from aspirations spontaneously springing up in 
their minds in perfectly normal, natural ways. It is 
claimed that this is true of Christianity just the same 
as of all the other ethnic religions. 

It is claimed that our religious beliefs are the result, 

142 



GENESIS OF CHRISTIANITY 143 

not of divine testimony and revelation, but of infer- 
ences from immediate human experiences. We find 
much in the doctrines of other religions, both ethical 
and theological, that is the same as or similar to things 
in the Christian system. We do not consider that these 
other religions got these doctrines by divine revelation, 
but believe they got them by reasoning and inference 
from the facts of human experience. If so, why should 
not the same doctrines in the Christian faith have been 
derived in the same way, in spite of the fact that they 
are recorded among the things communicated by God 
through prophets or in other ways ? 

From this it is but a short step to the claim that not 
only did these beliefs found in the other religions origi- 
nate in the Christian religion in the same way that they 
did in other religions, but everything else in the Chris- 
tian religion also originated in the same way. 

Ethics, Theology and Religion 
In order to consider this problem intelligently we 
must have accurate definitions to work with. There 
are three separate things that are very commonly con- 
fused and joined together under the one name Keligion. 
The first of these is Ethics or the discipline of char- 
acter and conduct. The second is Theology, or phi- 
losophy and knowledge about God. The third is this 
to which we have here restricted the name of Eeligion, 
and which consists of the practice of fellowship with 
God. 

It is the common custom to make the one word Re- 
ligion cover all these meanings, and there is no harm, 



144 THE SUPERNATURAL 

perhaps, in doing so, provided we recognize clearly and 
keep in mind that they are three quite separate things. 

As to the first two of these we need make no demur. 
It has been the assumption all through these discussions 
that these first two departments, Ethics and Theology, 
belong wholly to evolution, natural law and the efforts 
of men's minds working on the facts of experience. 
They are matters of knowledge, and knowledge is 
something that should always be entirely supplied 
from ordinary natural sources. We cannot believe 
that God, having made such an enormously wide range 
of knowledge spontaneously available to men through 
nature, should have fallen just a little short of making 
all available that was necessary, and that He had to 
resort to special supernatural interposition to supply 
the little remainder that was lacking. 

The knowledge systematized as Ethics and Theology, 
then, should be wholly knowledge derived from natural 
sources. True, as we have seen, God might for inde- 
pendent and appropriate reasons do personal, supernat- 
ural acts now that would contain suggestions and 
teaching as to His nature and will for man's conduct, 
and this would be a source from which we would get 
knowledge and ethical training also. He might for 
fellowship's sake make actual communications and rev- 
elations. But this does not contradict the claim that 
all our knowledge should come from natural sources, 
for all these fellowship acts must also be counted nat- 
ural sources. They would be just as integral a part of 
nature as any other of the more common observed facts 
and laws since that fellowship is an integral part of 



GENESIS OF CHEISTIANITY 145 

the one original evolution scheme. It would be just as 
legitimate and logical for knowledge in the line of 
Ethics or Theology to be drawn from these sources as 
from any other, and we could still say it was all de- 
rived from natural sources. 

Main Puepose of the Bible is Not to Reveal 
Knowledge 

It is indeed possible that knowledge from such special 
communications may have contributed to any or all of 
the ethnic religions as well as to Christianity. It is 
the belief of their votaries that it did, and we have at 
least no particular interest in combating their claims. 

And yet it is remarkable what a surprisingly small 
proportion of such knowledge, even in the Christian 
system, was really derived originally from such super- 
natural communications. It almost seems as though 
God were intentionally honouring the great school of 
normal knowledge which He had established by mak- 
ing His revelations in such a way as to interfere as 
little as possible with the habit of relying on ordinary 
sources for all our knowledge. It is not the purpose 
of the Bible to make new revelations of ethical truths 
directly by God to man, and really very few compara- 
tively are made there. 

Unquestionably there is a large amount of both eth- 
ical and theological truth in the Bible. Even in the 
Old Testament we find very much of such truth given 
in supernatural communications by the prophets and 
others. Not only our theologies but our systems of 
ethics as well draw largely from material found in the 



146 THE SUPEKRATUEAL 

Bible text, and the Bible has always properly been used 
as the most effective handbook for such teaching. But 
when we come to examine more definitely, how much 
of it, especially in the Old Testament, will we find was 
really new revelation of truths unknown until the time 
when it was given? A surprisingly small amount of 
it, at least of the ethical teaching, can justly be cred- 
ited as of that nature. 

Take the most conspicuous and noted instance of all, 
the Ten Commandments, said to have been directly 
given by God with an audible voice to the people 
(Ex. 20 : 1-17). Unquestionably they are very impor- 
tant and fundamental matters, but there is no new 
revelation of ethical truth there at all. To kill, steal, 
lie and covet, perjury, adultery, honour of parents,— 
surely all of these were topics that were not new to 
ethics then. Even the seventh day Sabbath was an 
old institution. There is not a single ethical principle 
enunciated there but what had long been known and ac- 
knowledged, and most of them had been the very basis 
and commonplace of the ethics of all the nations from 
the very dawn of history. 

When we turn to the theological side we find only a 
less degree of the same fact. The belief in one supreme 
God was not a new thing in the world then, nor the 
thought of the impropriety of representing Him by 
material images. Moreover from this side we can see 
what really was the purpose and meaning of it all. 

It was not a revelation of teaching but a Revelation 
of God. In its very form it purports to be that, for it 
begins with the ordinary, conventional formula of a 



GENESIS OF CHRISTIANITY 147 

formal introduction : — " I am the Lord thy God which 
brought thee out of the land of Egypt, etc." (Ex. 20 : 2). 
If we were to compare it to human movements it is 
much like a man meeting another with whom he 
wishes to get on friendly terms, introducing himself by 
name and by other identifying circumstances, and then 
proceeding to converse with him with appropriate 
commonplaces of edifying conventional talk. 

It was that personal touch with God that was the 
important thing rather than the intrinsic value of the 
things said. And His adding all the weight of His 
personality to all these important and recognized moral 
laws was the real ethical value of the incident. 

And what was true of this was true of practically all 
the rest of the ethical and theological revelation by 
prophets and others in the Old Testament. For the 
most part its essential purpose ethically was to put the 
weight of God's personality and all the pull of the bond 
of affection between the people and Him on the side 
of things known by them to be right and against doing 
things known to be wrong. Not to reveal new rules, 
principles or facts that were not known before, but to 
get them to obey known truths was the purpose of 
it all. 

Setting aside the purely local matters of details of 
government and religious ceremonial collaborated by 
God with Moses and others, there are in the Old Testa- 
ment really very few great ethical, or even theological, 
principles of general application, revealed that had not 
already been evolved and formulated by men long 
before. So that the fact of these things being made 



148 THE SUPERNATURAL 

the subject of revelation, — that is to say, used by God 
as topics of conversation, — does not at all affect the 
fact that their original genesis was reason and expe- 
rience, and they were truths that had already been 
worked out by men in the ordinary, normal, evolution- 
ary way. 

This same fact is illustrated from the other side in a 
striking way when we turn to the New Testament. 
In the sayings of Christ there are quite a few ethical 
and theological teachings that with more justice can be 
classed as new or real revelations. There is the com- 
mand to love our enemies, the universal fatherhood 
and real universal love of God, and a number of other 
truths. These things have been written in our com- 
pendiums and formally recited from the first, but for 
centuries they had no place in the practical and actual 
belief of the Christian world. And to some of them 
we have not even yet fully attained. They have only 
been able to gain the measure of acceptance they have 
by the slow process of evolutional growth. 

It is still further illustrated by the fact that even 
the theological level that had been attained and upon 
which Christianity took its rise was lost as soon as 
Christianity spread and tried to carry its doctrines to 
nations where those doctrines had not been naturally 
evolved. When the Christian religion came to be gen- 
erally adopted by the Gentile nations where the evolu- 
tion of doctrine was less advanced than in Judea, it 
soon was changed into a practical polytheism, veiled 
indeed by Christian names, with saints and apostles in 
place of the minor gods, but none the less real poly- 



GENESIS OF CHEISTIANITY 149 

theism of much the same grade as that which obtained 
in the localities before its advent. 

It may seem unreasonable, but it is the historical 
fact that all systems of truth must come by growth, 
and cannot be delivered and assimilated ready made. 
That is really the only way that beliefs can arise and 
win acceptance at large. 

If we apply this principle to the Bible and the older 
phases of our religion, many of the difficulties will dis- 
appear which have caused acute friction among mod- 
ern religious scholars. We need have no compunc- 
tions in recognizing that in spite of the large amount 
of special divine revelation given, the old Jewish ethics 
and theology developed just as naturally and under 
the same evolution agencies as the ethics and theology 
of any of the other nations. It could not have done 
otherwise, according to what history has shown us is 
the way truth spreads. 

Genesis of Fellowship 
But when we come to consider the third element, 
and that which we have defined to be the real essence 
of religion, fellowship with God, the problem is some- 
what different. That is not something merely learned, 
but something done. And it is essentially a mutual 
thing. To be real and genuine there must be contri- 
bution from both sides, — something done by God just 
as necessarily as something done by men. 

When we consider the matter from God's side and 
His bestowing fellowship or personal friendship it is 
evident that differences might arise which would make 



150 THE SUPERNATURAL 

one religious cult so far superior to all others as to be 
the only one to be considered. Indeed we must 
normally expect that there would be such radical 
difference. Personal friendship is always an exclusive 
matter. In its very essence it consists in giving to a 
certain individual a personal consideration and interest 
which is exclusively for him in distinction from all 
others. If we use the word " Friendship " in connection 
with God at all we should give it its proper, essential 
meaning. Personal friendship and benevolence are 
two distinct things, quite different both in nature and 
origin. 

Benevolence may be wide or universal in its scope, 
but friendship, on the contrary, the deeper it is the 
more it tends to limit its circle. Moreover though a 
man may have many friends yet the friendship with 
each one of them is just as separate and distinct as 
though he were the only one to whom he was giving 
friendship. So a high state of friendship with one 
man does not at all imply an equal state or any state 
of friendship with some other man, or indeed with any 
other man. It would not contradict the law of friend- 
ship at all, then, if there were a radically different 
state of friendship by God with the Jewish race than 
with any other race. He has benevolent love for all, 
but a high state of personal friendship there would not 
logically imply a similar state nor indeed any friend- 
ship at all with any of the other nations. 

We need not stop here to define the causes that 
might lead God to bestow special friendship on this 
one race. They may be definable or they may be causes 



GENESIS OF CHBISTTANITY 151 

wholly in God's own mind of which we have no means 
of knowing. The causes and beginnings of our own 
friendships are often very obscure. But if He did thus 
single out one race for special, personal friendship and 
allow the fellowship there to grow and develop into 
something radically higher and different from any- 
thing in any of the other nations He was only following 
the natural laws of friendship as we always see it in 
human relations. 

If religion is merely ethics developed under God's 
benevolence with nothing more, it might indeed be 
hard to see why there should not be at least some 
degree of parity among all the religions. But if, as 
Christ declared (John 15 : 15), and as we are maintain- 
ing here, religion is a state of personal friendship and 
fellowship with God, some one preeminent bestowal of 
that fellowship, and so some one unique and preemi- 
nent religion is just what the laws of friendship would 
lead us normally to expect. 

Our Christian tradition claims that there was such a 
special regime, namely, the personal friendship and 
fellowship bestowed by God on this one Jewish race. 
And while not denying the possibility of some acts or 
some degree of fellowship bestowed elsewhere, it claims 
that the personal fellowship bestowed here was some- 
thing radically different from and higher than that 
bestowed anywhere else. And still more, and most 
significant of all, it claims that this regime culminated 
in a great act wherein God Himself became man in the 
person of Jesus Christ, and associated on equal terms 
with other men, thus bestowing the fullest degree of 



152 THE SUPEKNATUKAL 

fellowship possible. That was the culmination of this 
one regime of fellowship, and certainly that constitutes 
the line with which it is connected something im- 
measurably higher than any other and altogether in a 
class by itself. 

Evolution Specializes 

Or if, on the other hand, we take up from man's side 
the matter of man achieving such a fellowship, even 
from that side it would not be unplausible to suppose 
that some one race might come to engage in a special 
measure of fellowship with God so much higher than 
that of any other as to be quite in a class by itself. 
Here also the laws of evolution give us no ground to 
assert that all religions must be equal. Because the 
Christian religion rose from the same origin and was 
naturally evolved the same as all the others is no 
reason to demand that no radical difference can be 
claimed between it and the other ethnic religions. 
True this fellowship which is its essence is a living 
something which must follow the laws of all biological 
evolution. But in evolution the same genesis and the 
same method of development do not at all imply 
equality in the resulting products. 

All biological evolution proceeds by the same 
methods and from the same origin. And yet one prod- 
uct of it, man, is so incomparably much higher than 
all the rest as to be wholly in a class by himself, and 
practically the only significant result of the process. 
It need not then be thought strange if the evolution of 
religion has produced a similar unique result, and per- 
haps in a somewhat similar way. 



GENESIS OF CHEISTIANITY 153 

For instance it is supposed by many that when the 
line of descent from which man came had reached a 
certain critical stage, perhaps by achieving articulate 
speech or some other faculty, a number of causes con- 
verged to both improve its character and to accelerate 
its rate of progress so that by a sort of " geometrical 
progression" it soon far outdistanced all others and 
became the only line to be considered. 

We can easily conceive that the development of 
religion in some certain race might in the same way 
reach a critical stage when its progress would go for- 
ward in accelerating "geometrical progression" and 
soon far outstrip all others. 

It is natural that it should do so, if religion is 
personal fellowship. Personal friendships always grow 
that way. Something starts a little special friendly 
interest between two persons, and immediately that 
friendly feeling, in the first place, tends to draw them 
more into each other's company with more opportunity 
for friendship to grow, and in the second place the 
friendly acts of each one stimulate greater friendly acts 
and feelings in the other, back and forth, at an increas- 
ing rate, till in a few days the friendship is advanced 
farther there than elsewhere by years of acquaintance. 

Let us suppose that some body of people, as for 
instance the ancestors of the Jewish race, in some way, 
perhaps through more correct conceptions of God's 
character or through some free initial kindness of God, 
got into a slightly higher state of friendly, confiding 
responsiveness towards God than the rest of the world. 
The difference though slight may have been critical 



154 THE SUPEKNATUBAL 

and both the principles above referred to would im- 
mediately operate to increase it. In the first place this 
new relation would naturally cause more frequent 
occasions for the bestowal of fellowship by God. And 
in the second place the favours on His side and the 
confiding trust on theirs would more and more stimu- 
late each the other to more and more such trust and 
favours, on and on with increasing intensity on both 
sides. It need not be long till the bond of fellowship 
there would be so far beyond that elsewhere as to be 
the only one to be considered. 

Whether this alone was the process, or whether, as is 
probable, a number of causes and processes may have 
converged to contribute, certainly it would be but fol- 
lowing the ordinary law for such a friendship once 
begun to grow special and exclusive. It is the nature 
of friendship thus always to specialize out certain per- 
sons for preeminent intimacy, and it is the law for a 
special relation once formed to strengthen and intensify. 
And so the friendly relation of God with this race and 
His acts of friendly intercourse with them would 
naturally become radically different from that towards 
any other race. 

God a Typical Feiend 
Now if this be in some degree the right interpreta- 
tion of the Old Testament history it would indicate 
that God but did what every man naturally and 
spontaneously does in forming his friendships. It 
would mean that God by the usual and natural process 
had developed and engaged in a relation of special 



GENESIS OP CHRISTIANITY 155 

friendship. It would mean that God's friendships are 
of the same kind and arise and grow in the same way 
that our friendships do. It would mean that this friend- 
ship and fellowship with God which is the essence of that 
precious thing we call our religion is not some mys- 
terious, transcendental thing, some formal ecclesiastical 
bond, but something that acts in the same way and is 
in the fullest sense all that the cordial, homely friend- 
ship of our other friends is, and it would mean that 
God may be expected to act towards us in the same 
way that any other true friend would. 

That this is really the value of the Old Testament 
movement is not at all contradicted by the fact that in 
the Bible narrative the later the era the stronger are 
the denunciations of sin and apostasy. That is precisely 
the effect we should look for. It is just the natural 
result to expect as the bond of friendship becomes 
closer with the nation and its demands on the individ- 
ual correspondingly more exacting. We must bear iiy 
mind also that it is not the whole nation but only the 
faithful portion of it, be they many or few, that God 
looks upon as the people with whom He is having the 
fellowship (cf. Rom. 9 : 6, etc.). In the end, though 
the Jews of Christ's time had many fatal faults and 
had the misfortune to be under the control of vicious 
ecclesiastical leaders, yet they were conspicuous in this 
one element of whole-souled and unswerving loyalty to 
Jehovah. It was because there was thus such a high 
level from which the mission could take its departure 
that Christ was able to send His religion out into the 
world with efficiency. And we may notice that when 



156 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

after Constantine it suddenly spread widely and became 
submerged in the common life of the general world it 
took over a thousand years for that religion to again 
get back and attain anew that same level of purity and 
loyalty which it had already attained among the Jews. 

It would be ignoring the most evident lesson of 
evolution, then, to say that because Christianity has 
had the same genesis as the other religions, and all 
have developed by the same method of growth, there- 
fore we cannot claim any critical superiority for it 
over any of the others. The lesson of evolution would 
lead us to expect quite the opposite result. The lesson 
of evolution is that though there may be many advanc- 
ing lines there is one only that has reached the top, and 
so only one that has real significance. 

If religion be fellowship it is evident that the ordinary 
working of the laws of evolution upon it, instead of 
making all religions of the same value, would inevitably 
tend to specialize on the one most suitable race, and 
make the relation of fellowship there, — that is to say, 
make their religion, — radically higher than that in any 
other race, make it as much different from the others 
as man is from the lower animals, — as close friendship 
is from mere conventional acquaintance among men. 

Among religions, as among animal species, though 
there may be many that have had the same genesis 
and the same method of development, and though 
many may have made vast development in various 
directions, yet after all we may logically expect that 
there will be but one that will have permanent 
significance and ultimate value. 



PART II 
The Old Testament 



I 

PUEPOSE OF THE BIBLE 

BEFOKE we take up any detailed study of the 
Old Testament and the rest of the Bible it will 
be very important to get a clear and correct 
conception of just what the Book purports to be. 

Let us take a parallel case. Here is a book that 
bears the title, " Algebra.' ' It looks externally not 
unlike other books. But when we begin to read it we 
find, along with ordinary text, something entirely un- 
explainable from the standpoint of good literature. 
We find letters combined in such a way as to make no 
words with any sense at all. Moreover we find other 
characters used that are not letters at all and are never 
found in ordinary literature. We may find such 
anomalous combinations for instance as : 



a 2 + 4ai/x 2 — y 2 = (m + n)(m — n) 
and others far more strange. 

If we tried to interpret the book as merely a book 
of ordinary literature, — philosophy, logic or something 
of that kind, — we might define such combinations of 
marks and letters as " supernatural." They are some- 
thing entirely outside of all the natural laws of good 
literature, and contain features that are not found in 
literature at all. We might say that either it was a 
blunder of the typesetter, or some later hand had med- 

159 



160 THE SUPEKNATUKAL 

died with the forms and mixed up the type. Such 
mixed up and strange combinations of letters are not 
only meaningless and valueless but are a blot upon an 
otherwise logical and edifying treatise. Just so men 
say all these things of the supernatural accounts that 
are found in the Bible narrative. 

We know, however, that this book is not a book of 
history, logic or anything of that kind but is an Alge- 
bra, and that such combinations of letters and special 
characters are always found in Algebras. Indeed in 
an algebra that sort of combination of letters and alge- 
braic symbols is the important and essential part, and 
all the common, ordinary letter press is merely aux- 
iliary and explanatory. "What if we should find that 
in the Bible too this was true, — that the supernatural 
incidents and supernatural features were really the es- 
sential and the important part, and all the history, 
poetry, teaching and all the rest, were merely the 
setting and the background. 

A Biogeaphy 
What is the Bible? What is the Old Testament? 
Is it merely the religious history of a race which had 
peculiar genius for religion ? If so it is an historical work 
of extreme interest, well worth a place beside the best 
works of Herodotus or Strabo. But if that is its nature, 
to look to it now as in any sense a moral guide or 
standard would be absurd. The embellishment of such 
a book with strange and spectacular supernatural ac- 
counts would give us no trouble indeed, for that is just 
what we expect to find in such old books. But we 



PURPOSE OF THE BIBLE 161 

would get rid of the burden of the supernatural by 
giving up the whole traditional religious value of the 
Book. 

Is it an illustrated handbook of moral and religious 
teaching ? The prophets were stern, holy men, preach- 
ers of righteousness. The histories hold up to us the 
inspiring examples of such heroes and saints as David, 
Samuel, Moses, Abraham and a brilliant array of other 
greater and lesser lights. But there is not one of these 
men but in the very brief account of his life there are 
things that would be condemned by even the blunted 
conscience of modern popular thought. Surely the 
enormous influence for good which the Bible has ex- 
erted cannot be accounted for on that basis. 

But according to the assumption which we are follow- 
ing here the Bible is neither one of these. We shall 
find that it is a history indeed, but it is not a history of 
the Jewish race. It contains much moral instruction 
indeed, but it is not a handbook of moral rules and 
models. It is a book with a hero indeed, but the hero 
is not David, or Moses or any other of the list. 

The Book has one hero and only one. The hero of 
the Book is God. The history is a history of God. It 
is a narrative of His acts and enterprises. It may ap- 
propriately be called a book of the biography of God. 
It is a history of one of His important enterprises in 
this world. 

It is a history of religion, but not of how men learned 
and discovered a high standard of religious truth. Re- 
ligion is not something that is made or learned but 
something done. It is a mutual social relation. It is 



162 THE SUPEEtfATTJKAL 

fellowship between God and men, and the Bible is the 
account of God doing on His part the acts of fellowship 
which were to inspire in men a responsive feeling of 
trust and fellowship. It is the history of God's great 
enterprise of religious propaganda, by which He was 
to establish, and eventually spread throughout the 
world, the true religion, which consists of enlightened 
and sincere fellowship with God. 

Natuee of a Biogeaphy 
The biography of a man is not made up entirely of 
accounts of things he did. It must give the setting 
of those acts. A complete biography of Bismarck, for 
instance, would bring in the history of the whole Ger- 
man Empire and of half the other countries of Europe. 
But still it would be strictly a biography of Bismarck. 
Just so, this biography of God brings in the history of 
the whole Israelite nation and of many men and events 
in other nations, and yet it is strictly a biography of 
God, and is to be estimated and interpreted on that 



It is not a biography of God in all His activities, but 
just in this one enterprise of inaugurating among men 
a condition of religious fellowship with Himself. It is 
a history of His religious propaganda. It will only 
bring in outside facts as they are related to that enter- 
prise. It will not primarily show God in His general, 
universal activities in nature, but in His personal, 
friendly dealings with individuals and specific groups 
of men. 

But such personal dealings of God with individuals 



PUEPOSE OP THE BIBLE 163 

are just what constitute the supernatural. As we have 
seen, it is precisely the accounts of such things in the 
Bible which are called by that name. This supernatu- 
ral part, therefore, must be the main thing, and the 
heart of the whole. 

Instead of considering the supernatural a burden, 
something we feel called upon to justify and would be 
glad if we could get rid of entirely, it is the real, cen- 
tral meaning of the whole Book, and all the rest is 
merely auxiliary to it. Instead of considering it a 
questionable embellishment of the message, it is the 
message itself. 

We may notice, by the way, that this is really the 
traditional feeling and the estimate the devout Chris- 
tian consciousness has always had, and which it was 
trying to express by calling the Book a Kevelation, and 
11 The Word of God." 



II 

ISEAEL 

THEEE is one problem which lies right across 
the path of our study, and that is the ques- 
tion why one single nation, the nation of 
Israel, should be presented as the sole recipients of God's 
favours. It is the representation all through the Bible 
that the Israelites were a people that stood in a special 
relation to God, that God looked upon them in a pe- 
culiar light, granted special privileges to them and 
special religious teaching. Indeed that practically all 
of God's supernatural discipline and religious propa- 
ganda for the world was given in this one nation. 

This is too obvious and prominent all through the 
Book and too fundamental to the whole meaning of the 
enterprises recounted to require any detailed references. 
The Book has even been familiarly called " The his- 
tory of God's chosen people " or some term of that 
nature. 

But any such specialness of any one nation or 
people before God seems entirely contrary to our 
modern conception of God and of His universal love 
for all the world. How can we possibly account for 
His giving, not merely once or twice but continuously 
all through their history, such special favours to one 
nation which He did not give to any other, and count- 

164 



ISEAEL 165 

ing them in a peculiar relation to Himself which no 
other nation had ? 

This whole idea has been confidently challenged as 
merely a mistaken conceit of the Israelite historians. 
They imagined that Jehovah was specially favourable 
to Israel, just as other nations imagined that some 
other god who was their patron deity was specially 
favourable to them. It is claimed that the whole idea 
of any specialness or special relation to God must be 
denied, apart from the special genius for religion which 
seemed to be their racial characteristic. Everything in 
the Book that is based on or grows out of that idea of 
a specialness must be rejected, even though that does 
necessitate an entire recasting of our estimate of the 
Book and of its place in religion. 

We could hardly deny the justice of this conclusion 
if religion is merely a species of moral culture, or if it 
is merely a means to enable men to get into heaven, or 
indeed a means to anything else for that matter. 

If religion is merely a process of men striving up- 
ward into the light we might admit that the Jewish 
race had more genius and ability in that direction, and 
so made more advance than the other nations, but not 
so much as to make them the sole and only ones to be 
considered. 

If religion is merely a matter of knowledge of God, of 
His will and of the way to escape punishment and get 
into heaven, it seems strange that God should closely 
confine the bestowal of that knowledge to one little 
obscure people, and not in some degree at least make a 
bestowal of it on all the rest of the world. 



166 THE SUPERNATURAL 

But it puts the whole matter in a different light en- 
tirely when we come to consider that this whole Bible 
movement is not any of those things but something 
quite essentially different. It is not something done 
for teaching or training or any other ulterior object. 
It is simply a course of personal fellowship engaged in 
by God for fellowship's sake. It is God seeking to 
make certain men His friends and companions, just as 
we approach certain persons with friendly advances be- 
cause we wish to give them our friendship, to make 
them our friends and to get their friendship and com- 
panionship to enjoy. 

The whole movement to which we now give the 
name of Religion is a movement by which God is in- 
augurating a state of friendly fellowship between men 
and Himself, — something that He contemplated and 
looked forward to from the very beginning, and which 
in one sense the whole evolution process was a means 
to make possible and to provide subjects for. 

The evolution process, — the great manufacturing 
enterprise, — has at last produced a product suitable, — 
a race of beings of high enough capacity to be capable 
of affording that social fellowship which God desired. 
God now proceeds to begin it. The whole Bible super- 
natural story is the account of some of God's move- 
ments to that end. We must judge it entirely from 
that standpoint. Our only criterion in judging it must 
be to consider what is customary with men in seeking 
to inaugurate and carry on friendship and fellowship 
with other men. We must consider it normal that 
God should proceed in substantially the same way that 



ISEAEL 167 

men would for a similar purpose. On larger lines, 
perhaps, and with appropriate variation of details, but 
yet in essentially the same way. 

Specialness a Necessity 
How then will God begin to enter into this personal, 
companionable fellowship with men, and win them to 
reciprocate it ? Not by teaching and training. That 
is not the way we make our friends. Not ^ven by 
goodness and general benevolence. That would not 
effect it. It must be by bestowing personal friendship 
itself. Benevolence is an entirely different thing that 
is often confused with this, but from which it must be 
carefully distinguished. A man's goodness or benevo- 
lence is an entirely different thing from his personal 
friendship. It is a state of mutual personal friendship 
which we consider is now to be inaugurated. God's 
goodness and benevolence had been in exercise from 
the beginning. 

Benevolence is normally something broad. We ex- 
pect it to include as large a number as possible in its 
bounty. The nature of friendship is just the opposite 
of this. Its strongest expression is the most exclusive. 
In all cases it must be with definite individuals. Its 
restriction to the specific individual is what constitutes 
it friendship and fellowship instead of merely benevo- 
lence. 

A man may, indeed, have many friends, but his atti- 
tude towards each one of them must be as separate and 
personal as though he were the only one so treated. 
The very essence of friendship and fellowship consists 



168 THE SUPERNATURAL 

in making the individual feel that you are giving him 
a consideration that is special to him in distinction 
from all others. 

This being so, it is plain that this religious propa- 
ganda, since it is entirely a fellowship matter, could not 
be general to all the world but must be restricted and 
personal in order to be really friendship and fellow- 
ship. 

Of course when considering the relations and acts of 
God the term Individual may be expanded to include a 
restricted group so unified as to feel like a unit or indi- 
vidual in relation to the rest of the world. This would 
be especially true in ancient times when the nation was 
more largely than now the real, practical unit in all 
things. A family or small nation conceiving itself to 
be descended from one ancestor might especially be so 
considered. 

For various and obvious reasons God's fellowship 
dealings might be expected to be with such larger units 
or groups quite as much as with the single person. But 
it could not be general to the world at large. There 
must be this restriction to the individual or individual- 
istic group in order to constitute it fellowship and make 
it have the effect of personal friendship on the feelings 
of the recipient. 

If God then is to do this which is the goal of all the 
evolution process, — is to enter into the exercise and en- 
joyment of fellowship with men, — He can only do it 
by making the advances of fellowship not to the world 
at large but to specific individuals or to some restricted 
group of this character,— to some group so unified as 



ISEAEL 169 

to have the feeling of individual or family solidarity, 
and it just happened that the people of Israel was the 
one He chose to use. 

Feiendship of God 

We need, then, have no difficulty in seeing why God 
should have treated the Jewish nation in such a differ- 
ent way from any other nation, and made practically 
all His great supernatural manifestations to them. We 
can see that that is the only way that He could reason- 
ably do such acts at all. It might have been this na- 
tion, Israel, or it might have been some other nation, 
but it must be some one nation singled out to give the 
distinctive special treatment to or it would not be fel- 
lowship at all. 

Moreover friendship is not something to be given one 
day and taken back the next. It is not this nation to- 
day and some other nation to-morrow. Having once 
given His personal friendship to this nation of the Jews 
He remained constant in that friendship bond during 
all that nation's life. If it taught us nothing more the 
Bible history of Israel might teach us a valuable lesson 
in the sacredness of the pledge of friendship. 

We have already noted how a relation of special 
friendship once formed spontaneously tends by its very 
nature to grow stronger and stronger. And as we 
shall find later, the whole course of the history follows 
exactly the lines which we recognize as the accepted 
code of friendship as it is recognized in human rela- 
tions. At least it was so on God's side. 

It began with a very congenial friendship between 



170 THE SUPERNATUBAL 

God and one man, Abraham (cf. Isa. 41 : 8, etc.). In 
the course of their friendly companionship God gave 
the promise that He would continue a similar relation 
of personal friendship to Abraham's children and de- 
scendants (Gen. 17 : 7, etc.). That relation thus pledged 
God kept with scrupulous honour. 

Because He stood in this relation of pledged friend- 
ship with this nation of Abraham's descendants, God 
did as acts of fellowship with them the long series of 
supernatural acts, — acts which could not have been 
justified on any other ground, but which were the nat- 
ural and appropriate way for God to give personal 
friendship and fellowship to persons whom He chose 
to regard in that relation. 

This fact, then, of the special relation in which God 
is represented as standing to the nation of Israel does 
not imply that the nation or the people were in any 
respect essentially different from the other nations and 
people of that age. It does not necessarily imply even 
that they were morally any better or any higher in 
their theological conceptions. It only means that if 
God were to begin to bestow personal fellowship He 
must have some specific people to bestow it on, and 
this was the specific people. 

If His friendship was to have the satisfying genuine- 
ness that makes human friendships so precious, it must 
be constant and it must be personal and definite. God 
could only begin that regime of fellowship, — that great 
consummation for which all the evolution process had 
been preparing, — by selecting some specific people to 
begin the fellowship with, and these were the people 



ISEAEL 171 

so selected. It might have been some other nation, 
but it must be some specific nation, and this was the 
^specific one. This was the natural way and the only 
feasible way in which God could inaugurate His great 
religious propaganda of Fellowship with Men. 

This representation of God standing in a special 
relation to this one nation of Israel is not a mistake. 
It is not a mere conceit of the national historian, a 
natural but groundless imagination. It was a fact, and 
a fact with most important meaning. It was, as it has 
always traditionally been considered to be, a funda- 
mental feature conditioning all the enterprise which the 
Bible records. It was simply the best and the normal 
way to effect the object God had in view, namely, to 
make men feel that He could be a sympathetic friend 
to them individually. 



Ill 

ABKAHAM 

THE supernatural in the Old Testament might 
be divided into three general divisions : 
First, there are the Miracles, the specific 
acts and incidents to which we commonly apply the 
term Supernatural. 

Second we may put Prophecy, including the contin- 
uous order of prophets spoken of, and the recorded 
writings of some of them given in the Book. 

The third division would include all the historical 
and narrative parts. These are classed as supernatural 
on the ground that all through they aim to exhibit God 
behind the natural events, and the events themselves 
are chiefly significant as illustrating God's directive in- 
fluence in human affairs. 

Of course this is assuming the substantial correctness 
of the narratives, which some challenge. But we are 
here making our interpretation of the Bible confessedly 
at its face value and with the traditional estimate, to 
see if on that basis it can be justified. From that view- 
point we may include all this material as various forms 
or species of the supernatural. 

We may take up, then, the first division, the concrete 
events, — the specific miraculous or supernatural occur- 
rences recorded in the Old Testament. 

172 



ABRAHAM 173 

Beginning of the Era of Keligion 

Though the religious movement of which we are the 
heirs began very far back in the morning of the race, 
it will be more convenient to begin our study with the 
time of Abraham, when the movement becomes more 
definite and observable. 

It may be that the Adamic story given in the early 
chapters of Genesis is intended to portray the very be- 
ginning of the movement. As the genealogy in Luke 
puts it (Luke 3 : 38), " Adam was the son of God." 
That is to say, he was the first to stand in a personal, 
companionable relation to God. At that time God 
first began to deal with men in this relation of fellow- 
ship which we call Eeligion. 

Up to that time the evolution process had not pro- 
ceeded above the level of the merely animal. There 
were higher and lower animals, and that particular 
strain from which man was to descend had advanced 
very much higher than any other. They may have 
already developed all of the intellectual powers and 
faculties that distinguish man now. But yet in their 
relation to the creator God, and in His attitude towards 
them they were only animals and treated as such. 

Keligion as fellowship with God is something that 
consists of and grows out of definite personal acts of 
God to individuals. JSTo such act had yet been done by 
God to any individual of this evolving species, and no 
intimation had been made to them or conception formed 
by them that any such would be done. Indeed that 
personal relation with God had not yet begun, and the 
species had not yet been given the right to come into 



174 THE SUPERNATURAL 

that relation. They were in all their relations, both in 
their bodily life and in whatever might lie to them be- 
yond the bodily life, not any different from what the 
other animals are. They were exceedingly keen, 
shrewd, most marvellous animals, but yet from the 
standpoint of religion merely animals. 

With the period which the Adamic narratives por- 
tray God began to give personal acts of fellowship to 
this species, or preferably to some individual or family of 
this species (cf . Gen. 4 : 14-17 ; 6 : 2, etc.), for fellowship 
is always with the individual. He made them aware 
that He would do so, and that He expected reciprocal 
feelings and acts from them, and thereby entailed upon 
them a new world of responsibility. Indeed they were 
thereby raised to a new level, — a new species. And 
membership in a higher species necessarily entails 
additional responsibilities and new conditions to be 
met if the individual is to thrive, — and the species 
persist. 

Something like the above is what, from the evolution 
point of view, it is plain must at some time have been 
the state of the line of descent from which man came, 
and some such transition must at some time have been 
gone through in the course of the development of the 
race, if men have evolved from lower animals which 
had no such relation to God. And something like that 
would seem to be a possible meaning of these Adamic 
narratives or poems. From that time God began to 
give personal treatment to men. In other words, that 
was the date from which the era of the supernatural 
began. It was the beginning of the regime of religion, 



ABKAHAM 175 

and so the correct date for the beginning of the Bible 
history since it is the history of religion, or of God 
offering fellowship to men. 

But the whole narrative, and the whole atmosphere 
portrayed, down to the time of Abraham, is so different 
from that of modern history that we may take the lib- 
erty to pass it over in our examination. From the time 
of Abraham the narrative proceeds more in the style 
and atmosphere of modern history, and we may com- 
mence at that point to examine the supernatural, — these 
incidents in it which are different from the natural in- 
cidents that we ordinarily find recorded in history^ 
The religious propaganda is quite definite and concen- 
trated from that time on, and for that reason also we 
may profitably take that as the starting point of the 
study of this which we have inherited as our religion. 

How Will Fellowship Begin ? 

Let us suppose that God proposes to begin a regime 
of fellowship with men, — a religious propaganda. Or 
rather let us suppose He is entering upon a new stage, 
a more definite and systematic promotion of that fellow- 
ship regime. How will He go about it ? 

Fellowship is not something to be promoted either by 
teaching or by general benevolence. It is a mutual in- 
terchange of sympathetic companionship, and can only 
be promoted by doing appropriate personal acts, — the 
acts in which fellowship consists. It implies God do- 
ing something special and personal. Indeed under the 
circumstances it implies God taking all the initiative. 
Even among men where one party is very much higher 



176 THE SUPERNATURAL 

than the other, real fellowship is never established 
unless the higher party makes all the advances. 

The movement had already begun with Adam, but 
with Abraham we are supposing that God designs to 
begin an important advance of that fellowship move- 
ment. Abraham was already the Sheik of a large tribe 
of several thousand persons (cf. Gen. 14 : 14). Their 
descendants would develop into a nation, and this nation 
was the one which God was to take to be the subject 
of this great movement in religion. He intended to so 
lead and develop them that they would respond to His 
advances, and that He might thus be able to bestow 
His fellowship and companionship upon them. That 
is the project God has in mind. What would be the 
steps that it would seem most natural for God to take 
to begin to bring it about ? 

It is plain that God's first task in beginning the great 
fellowship propaganda must be to lay deep in men's 
minds the feeling of God's friendliness and approach- 
ableness. That is the thing they must be grounded in 
first, for it is the one essential and fundamental thing. 
The other particulars, the feeling of His greatness, holi- 
ness, wisdom and the rest, can be gradually added at 
leisure, but that is the first essential, with which alone 
there could be fellowship, but without which fellow- 
ship would be impossible. 

If that is the thing desired it would be hard to con- 
ceive of a better and more effective way to accomplish 
it than just such a course as is outlined in the Abra- 
hamic narrative. It is all a narrative of simple, homely 
friendship. The expression is used that "Abraham 



ABBAHAM 177 

was called the Friend of God," and the converse of 
that is also true, that the whole tone of the narrative 
represents God as the familiar, congenial friend of 
Abraham. All the supernatural events recorded have 
distinctly that colouring. They all have one theme, 
namely, a powerful friend having occasional friendly 
dealings with His friend. 

This is vividly illustrated by some of the incidents 
which otherwise seem hardest to understand and justify. 
When Abraham himself is acting in far from a high and 
noble manner the Friend is still loyal to him, as a friend 
should be. For instance, in the cases when his cowardly, 
deceitful conduct about his wife got him into trouble in 
Egypt (Gen. 12:11-20), and Philistia (Gen. 20:1-7), 
the Friend stood by him just as loyally as though he 
had been worthy of it, and got him out of the trouble. 

It is hard to see how the attitude of God in such in- 
cidents as these could be justified on any theory that 
God appears there as moral ruler, or as teaching the 
way of a perfect life. He gives nothing but opposition 
and trouble to the Egyptians and Philistines who acted 
in all innocence, and nothing but help to Abraham, 
who was entirely to blame. 

But if He is appearing merely as Abraham's friend, 
that is the only way He could do. That is precisely 
what would be required by the code of friendship, but 
something hard to justify on any other grounds. 

Tutelae Divinities 
It has been cited as indicating a low character for 
all these narratives, that Jehovah figures merely as the 



178 THE SUPERNATURAL 

tutelar or tribal patron divinity of Sheik Abraham, just 
as any other great sheik would have some patron 
divinity that he thought was specially favourable to 
him. 

That representation is correct. God does so appear 
there, and He was just that and intended to be so. He 
must be that if He would be the kind of God that reli- 
gion presupposes and requires. That instinct which 
led other tribes, communities or nations to believe in a 
tutelar divinity specially favourable to them, was a cor- 
rect, because natural, instinct, growing out of the nat- 
ural needs of the heart. It is that need that God by 
His true religion means to satisfy. That is really the 
very essence of our devotional religion to-day. It is 
personal friendship, and personal friendship is always 
something which is specific to the individual in dis- 
tinction from all others. 

Jehovah was to Abraham just what the tutelar divin- 
ities of other tribes were conceived to be to them, for 
that is something that the human heart needs, and it is 
the fundamental essence of religion. But His being 
that did not prevent His also being far more. God 
could be perfect man in Jesus Christ without inter- 
fering with the fact that He was also infinite God. 

That is the key to the whole problem and one of the 
things we must not forget about God. He is great 
enough that He can do little things just as easily as 
great things, and exhibit Himself in small relations 
just as easily as in great ones. The first and funda- 
mental relation in which He wished to exhibit Himself 
to men, as the basis of all their religion instincts, was 



ABEAHAM 179 

the relation of Friend, and that is the distinct character 
of all His relations with Abraham. 

A religion whose God was a being merely of infinite 
power and wisdom would be sure to become a religion 
of abject fear, practically like those religions in low 
races which are called Devil Worship. If we add in- 
finite justice and holiness it would but intensify the 
fear, for men have consciences. Even if we add good- 
ness and general benevolence, it would relieve the 
situation very little. Our experience with men of that 
character, especially if they are very rich, high and 
powerful, is not very reassuring. Too often we ob- 
serve that the more personally good and benevolent a 
man is, the more exacting he is in his criticisms of 
other people. 

As a matter of fact it is the very hardest thing for 
men to get to feel that a very great and good being 
can also be very approachable, friendly and sympa- 
thetic. Even with the benefit of all the Bible teaching 
as to God's friendship and its concrete revelation in 
Jesus Christ, yet so hard is it to really feel it that 
through all the middle ages the feelings of men made 
it necessary to bring in the Virgin Mary as the real 
object of religious trust, affection and prayer, while 
God the Father, and even the incarnate Jesus were 
felt to be too exalted and severe for human comfort. 

We can well see, then, why the first and most 
essential thing in launching the great propaganda of 
religion must be to take steps to get men well grounded 
in the feeling of the friendship and familiar sympathy 
of God. And that is just what such incidents as are 



180 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

recorded in the Abrahamie narratives would be 
specially adapted to do. 

Two Sep abate Kelations 
To make an analogy, imagine the case of some 
feudal retainer or court servant, who has come to be a 
special favourite with his king or lord. The king has 
a special fondness for him, and while he continues 
right on in the duties and dangers of his service, yet 
the king finds frequent occasion to meet with him as 
friend with friend and enjoy his society, as well as to 
favour him in various ways and stand loyally by him as 
his friend. That would be a fairly accurate analogy of 
this record of the intercourse of Abraham with God. It 
illustrates the fundamental essence of the religion which 
God wishes to have us practice, and in which He was 
beginning to train Abraham and his descendants here. 

But we must note that while God's dealings with 
Abraham here, and with men generally in religion, are 
in the attitude of friend rather than of moral ruler, 
that does not mean that men are to act towards God 
only as a friend, and never give Him the treatment 
appropriate to a ruler. Even the court favourite must 
always recognize that the king is king. God is our 
Moral Kuler. That is an integral part of natural law. 
It is both natural and useful that men should treat God 
in that capacity. Eeligion does not advise men not to 
give God the obedience due to a ruler because it gives 
them the privilege of approaching Him as their friend. 
The two relations are not at all mutually exclusive or 
contradictory. 



ABEAHAM 181 

Even part of God's friendly intercourse as a friend 
with man may consist in teaching him the proper con- 
duct towards Himself as Moral Ruler and Sovereign, 
and in taking suitable steps to get men to give Him 
that proper respect and treatment. It is really friend- 
ship and kindness to do so. The king would be un- 
kind towards his favourite if he did not when necessary 
give him suitable advice and training in courtly manners 
and behaviour. 

The fact of these two relations, then, is fundamental 
and important. While God does not in the least abdi- 
cate His position of Moral Ruler, with all its necessary 
duties and results devolving on men, yet He does ap- 
proach and deal with men distinctly in the character 
of friend, with all the sympathy as well as all the 
privileges and amenities that our ordinary human re- 
lations of friendship imply. 

If we keep these two principles clearly in mind we 
will be able to see a consistency and appropriateness in 
all the Old Testament narratives of God's dealings 
with men. And we will be able to see that by means 
of them the Old Testament does after all bring a most 
valuable contribution to religion, quite on the same 
level as the New Testament, and well worthy to be 
esteemed a revelation of God. 

Always as Feiend, Not as Moeal Ruler 
ik the supeenatural acts 

The supernatural dealings of God with Abraham 
consist first of a number of intimate, friendly inter- 
views in which He makes him various promises, such 



182 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

as the promise of a son, of possession of all that land, 
of numerous posterity and general prosperity in the 
future. In all these the attitude of God is represented 
to be that of a familiar friend, though in some cases He 
invests the interview with an air of mystery and 
solemnity suggestive of a supernatural being. In the 
interview about the destruction of Sodom this plane 
of familiarity is especially emphasized. " Shall I hide 
from Abraham the thing I am about to do," He says 
(Gen. 18:17), as though it would be unkind to keep 
secrets from His friend. 

It is the extreme anthropomorphism in all these ac- 
counts that in many minds has stamped them as being 
certainly mythological. But really it was just that 
view of God's character which it was the most neces- 
sary to impress at this time. It was the most impor- 
tant thing for the purposes God had in view that there 
should be this extremely anthropomorphic aspect in all 
these appearances. It was to fix indelibly in the hearts 
of this race the feeling of God's personality and of His 
friendly sympathy. Those are thoughts far more im- 
portant for religion, at least at first, than the deeper 
truths about His wisdom, justice, power and other 
attributes. God considered them of such great im- 
portance that He became man in the person of Jesus 
Christ just to be able to impress those features and 
make men feel them. 

These incidents, and others like them, did fix deeply 
in the hearts of this race the feeling that God was 
their friend, and could be trusted and leaned upon as a 
friend. They have had much part in producing that 



ABEAHAM 183 

feeling in all the Church down to modern times, and 
Christians who still have the old faith in the old Bible 
still get a good deal of their feeling of the reality of 
God as a sympathetic friend from these same old 
stories. It is rejecting all this part of the Bible as 
spurious or mythological that has had much influence 
in bringing many Christians to lose their vivid sense of 
God as a present sympathetic friend, and to make re- 
ligion to be merely and solely a matter of character- 
building and social service, with God retained in it 
chiefly as an ornament, — a sort of President Emeritus, 
retained for the prestige of His name. 

Certainly such stories as these do have the effect of 
making God seem near and sympathetic. Children, 
for instance, who believe in them implicitly, do get 
from them a vivid feeling of God's reality and His 
friendliness. Those who consider them fiction would 
admit that as fiction such stories would be precisely 
calculated to rouse in their readers such a feeling. 

If men could be wise enough to make up fictitious 
stories suited for producing that feeling, is not God 
wise enough to make the real thing for the same pur- 
pose, if the purpose is important enough ? It is no 
more task for God to make the real thing than it is for 
man to make the fictitious story, only provided there 
is a desirable purpose to be attained by it. Nothing is 
difficult or unlikely for God to do, if only there is a 
sufficient motive for doing it. It is entirely a question 
of reasons and importance, and here we see that the 
entire purpose of God's great enterprise calls for some- 
thing that will produce just that; feeling in men's hearts, 



184 THE SUPERNATURAL 

— calls for something precisely of the character of the 
events and relations which are narrated here, 

This same feature of God's loyal friendship for 
Abraham is brought out in the two little side incidents 
of God's appearing to the bondwoman Hagar. First, 
when she is mistreated by her mistress and runs away, 
she is met by God's angel and told to go back again to 
her mistress (Gen. 16 : 71)? precisely as a friend of the 
family would have done if he had run across her, and 
without any notice at all of the injustice with which 
she had been treated. Later when she is sent away 
rather cruelly by Abraham, God's angel again finds 
her and befriends her (Gen. 21 : 17 ff.), but does it very 
expressly for Abraham's sake, because her son Ishmael 
is Abraham's son. It is not the God of Justice, cer- 
tainly not the teacher of morals and character, that is 
most in evidence here, but merely the loyal, faithful 
friend of Abraham. 

In the incident of the great trial with regard to 
offering up his son Isaac (Gen. 22 : 1-13), this is not so 
evident at first sight, perhaps, but yet that really is the 
nature of the incident. It is essentially a friend testing 
the loyalty and trust of His friend, rather than the act 
of a Moral Governor and divine sovereign. And this 
fact helps to explain and justify what to the modern 
conscience has presented several questionable features. 

God wishes to test the faith and loyalty of His 
friend. Not that He has any doubts Himself about it 
or does not know, but rather He takes this means to 
make conspicuous to all the world these noble traits 
which He knew that His friend Abraham had in a 



ABEAHAM 185 

remarkable degree. Though it was doubtless pretty 
severe while it was going on, yet really there was 
no greater kindness or honour which He could have 
showed to His friend than thus to prove conspicuously 
before the world his noble character. 

Familiar Approachableness Eather Than 
Greatness 

The trouble with us in these days is that we have 
become so obsessed with the idea of bigness that we 
can appreciate nothing but the bigness of God. It is 
the biggest battle-ship, the biggest steel company, the 
biggest international exposition that holds all our at- 
tention. It is the infinite bigness of God that makes 
the greatest appeal to us. It is a new discovery, and 
we can't get through admiring it. Like the boy with 
a new toy, who thinks it is about the most important 
thing in the world, science has discovered the unmeas- 
urable bigness and greatness of God, and we can't 
bring our minds to appreciate that there are other 
aspects of His character that may be of just as much, 
or far more, religious value than this fact of His ex- 
treme greatness. 

As a philosophical fact this conception of the great- 
ness of God is, of course, of very great importance. 
But for practical devotional purposes, to us that great- 
ness, beyond certain limits, is not an advantage but the 
reverse. So much so that God had to veil that great- 
ness by a human body and human nature in Jesus 
Christ in order that it might be possible to make the 
approach to us which religion required. For that 



186 THE SUPEKKATUKAL 

greatness tends to obscure in our minds the tenderer, 
sympathetic qualities which form the basis of religion, 
and which alone can meet the longings of our hearts. 

We are making now that same mistake that the 
Church in the middle ages made. They allowed their 
minds to dwell so much upon the exalted majesty of 
Jesus as the Son of God that even Jesus became ex- 
alted entirely beyond the range of human sympathy, 
and they had to bring in the offices of the Virgin Mary 
and the Saints to supply that sympathetic friendship 
which they could no longer conceive of God as afford- 
ing. We have equally, from another angel, exalted 
God in our thoughts to such an infinite greatness that 
the same result has ensued. Only we have not put in 
any substitute, as they did, but have built up a religion 
consisting solely of character and social service, that 
don't really much require any God to make it go. 

What we most need to-day is to get back again to 
the Old Testament with its anthropomorphic God. 
We need just what these old Abraham stories furnish 
to put a little blood and life into our religious experi- 
ence. What our hearts need, just as much as theirs 
and the people of all time, is this familiar, companion- 
able God depicted here, who met with Abraham as 
friend with friend, stood by him just as helpfully when 
he did not deserve it as when he did, who seemed to 
treat him almost as a bosom companion from whom He 
had no secrets, and who had human spirit and humour 
enough to employ a friendly stratagem to make con- 
spicuous to all the world the marvellous faith and 
loyalty of His friend Abraham. 



IV 

MOSES 

THERE are a very few cases of the supernatural 
in the times of Abraham's near descendants, 
Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, consisting of visions, 
dreams and interpretations of dreams. Isaac has two 
visions in which the promises already made to Abraham 
are renewed to him (Gen. 26 : 2-5, 24). Jacob has the 
dream of the ladder up to heaven (Gen. 28 : 12 ff.), 
which Jesus Himself interprets (John 1 : 51) as con- 
veying the same lesson which His own coming proved, 
namely, that God is accessible to men and sympathetic 
with them. Also there were the angels and the man 
wrestling with him on his return from Padanaram with 
a similar value (Gen. 32 : 1-24 ff.). Joseph's dreams 
(Gen. 37 : 5-11) were of personal favour and greatness 
that was to be his, and his interpretation of the dreams 
in Egypt (Gen. 40 : 9-19 and 41 : 25-36) were part of 
God's plan to bring that favour to him. All of these 
were calculated to make them feel that God was in- 
terested in them and caring for their personal welfare. 
All were very appropriate contributions to the great 
purpose God had in His religious propaganda at that 
stage. 

After this we have record of no more supernatural 
acts for several long centuries, till the times of Moses. 

187 



188 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

Eeading the Bible one perhaps carelessly gets the 
impression that the history of the Israelite race is 
represented there as a continuous succession of these 
miraculous events. The fact is that the record only 
speaks of a few, coming at specially significant epochs 
and hundreds of years apart. This relieves to some 
extent the feeling of abnormalness. 

Of course the occurrence of one single supernatural 
event is just as great a problem as the occurrence of a 
hundred, for it equally implies the same kind of a new 
and different agency, and the agent that could do one 
might also do a hundred. And yet a kind of event 
that we never see at all in our own time we perhaps 
find it easier to be reconciled to if its occurrence is not 
represented as too frequent when it does occur. 

Eeason fob Miracles at This Time 
When we come to the times of Moses, however, we 
find the largest and most brilliant collection of these 
miraculous events anywhere recorded in the Old Testa- 
ment, and second only to those that occur in the life 
of Christ. Is there a sufficient reason for this? Is 
there any purpose which God had at this time that 
would call for this kind of events ? and if so is it of 
such a special nature that it would call for such an un- 
usual number of them ? 

This was the time of the founding of the nation of 
Israel. It was the most important epoch in the history 
of the people from whom all our religious traditions 
have been received. Still if we interpret the history 
of Israel merely as the history of a people who had 



MOSES 189 

great insight to appreciate religious truth, and if re- 
ligion is merely knowledge of God's law and develop- 
ment of character and conduct in accordance with that 
law, any miracles at all at such a time would seem to 
be not only unnecessary but a positive hindrance. 

According to the theory we are following, however, 
religion is a matter of fellowship with God, and fellow- 
ship is not a matter of discovery or insight but of active 
deeds and intercourse. It is something which requires 
God to do something as well as men. Not because 
God has to teach it or men would not know the way. 
Even that might be an insufficient plea for the presence 
of supernatural acts. God has to do part of it or there 
is no fellowship. 

Israel is to be the nation where this religion of 
reciprocal fellowship is to be specially cultivated. It 
is natural therefore to expect that in special crises of 
their history some conspicuous acts of God's super- 
natural fellowship will be done. This time of Moses is 
a period which we may consider the most important 
epoch in all their history, for it is the time of first es- 
tablishing and organizing them as a nation. It will not 
be unreasonable therefore to find a very special display 
of God's supernatural works occurring at that time. 

We have just seen that the first great cluster of such 
events occurred at the time when this specific move- 
ment was first being launched, — when God was first 
separating out the race of people and beginning with 
them the long course of religious propaganda, in the 
time of Abraham. Though that movement, of select- 
ing and setting apart this race, was more fundamental, 



190 THE SUPERNATURAL 

yet the movement now of erecting them into a nation 
was a much larger movement, and there were many 
more people present and concerned, so we find even 
more of these supernatural acts at this time than in the 
time of Abraham. 

They are also of a slightly different kind, as befits 
the case, larger and broader in their nature, and includ- 
ing the feature of calamities inflicted on other nations 
in aid of this nation, and also of chastisement of unruly 
parts of the nation itself for the greater benefit of the 
whole. At bottom, however, the acts all have the 
same nature as those done to Abraham, namely, acts of 
friendship, even we may say of partiality. They are not 
the acts of impartial rule and justice, such as we would 
naturally attribute to the moral ruler of the world, but 
partial acts of special friendship and favouritism to one 
certain favoured nation. Indeed they are afterwards 
emphatically and frequently appealed to as being acts 
of partiality and favour. 

Beginning of the Movement 
The beginning of this group of miracles was the call 
of Moses by God in the burning bush in the wilder- 
ness (Ex. 3:2ff.). This has been interpreted as a 
very significant sign, indicating that though Israel was 
in the midst of the fire of affliction they would not be 
consumed. But far more important than any such 
mystical meaning is the simple fact itself, that after 
long centuries of silence in the unseen, God was now 
again beginning to give visible exhibition of His per- 
sonal interest and sympathy for His people. 



MOSES 191 

It must indicate that some epoch of importance has 
arrived. God always has sympathy and personal care 
for His people, but it is not commonly His plan to show 
it visibly. He always has perfect sympathy and in- 
terest when He is not giving any visible sign as well as 
when He is, so it is not a proof of new or greater in- 
terest when there is some visible sign or miracle on 
their behalf. It must be a sign that some special epoch 
or occasion has arisen in which it would be appropriate 
to make one of the occasional visible manifestations of 
His interest. 

And so we see that this marks the beginning of a 
great movement by which the Israelites were removed 
from Egypt, organized into a nation and settled in the 
land of Canaan, in which they were to play the lead- 
ing part in the development of religion for many cen- 
turies. In some respects this was one of the most im- 
portant events in history, — that is to say, it was an 
epoch or crisis in recent evolution. 

While the outward appearance of this miracle was 
such as to suggest mystery and fear, by the fire and 
the unconsumed bush, yet the actual substance of the 
interview was such as to confirm our position that when 
God appears in the supernatural it is never in the char- 
acter of moral ruler, creator or anything else that be- 
longs to nature, but always in the character of partial, 
patient friend. 

The movement is now going to be national. He is 
going to deal with nations. He assigns Moses a place 
and a leading part in the great act of friendship He is 
going to do for the nation. But it is distinctly as His 



192 THE SUPEBNATUKAL 

own agent. Moses is to be simply God's agent in a 
great friendship act. 

It is an act of friendship and not of justice or judg- 
ment, and it is so set forth. There is no hint that the 
Egyptians did not have a perfect right to retain the 
Israelites as slaves. Israel themselves did the same to 
the Gibeonites at a later period. It was recognized as 
a perfectly allowable thing in that age. It is true that 
complaint is made of great cruelty that the Egyptians 
had inflicted on them (Ex. 3 : 7, etc.), but that is not re- 
ferred to as a crime of inhumanity to be punished but 
simply as a misfortune under which His friends suf- 
fered and from which He was going to deliver them. 
It is altogether a case of a powerful friend se< ing His 
friends in distress and proposing to go and help them. 

Towards Moses, too, personally God acts more like 
a friend than a sovereign. Instead of commanding 
him He reasons with him to persuade and assure him. 
Even after Moses had resisted and refused in the most 
disappointing manner He is still patient and gentle 
with him, plans for his brother to be a helper to him, 
and gives him several signs of a supernatural nature 
both to reassure him and to give him standing before 
the Egyptian court. 

After Moses goes back to Egypt, shows his signs, 
and his demand for the liberty of his people is followed 
by the command for still severer bondage, there follow 
the ten plagues (Ex. 5-12), by which the Egyptians are 
entirely overawed and the Israelite people are allowed 
to go out from the country. 

It is not necessary to go into the details of either the 



MOSES 193 

signs or the plagues. They all have the same object, 
to so frighten the Egyptians that they would be will- 
ing to let their slaves run away from them, and at the 
same time to impress those slaves, the people of Israel, 
with the fact that they had a very powerful friend who 
was exerting Himself on their behalf. 

That is the real character of the whole transaction. 
It is not judgment on the Egyptians for any crime. It 
is not punishment. It is not even claimed to be an act 
of justice. It is simply the arbitrary act of one who 
was strong enough to do it, taking away the lawful 
slaves of the Egyptian people and giving them their 
freedom, because they were His friends and He wished 
to do them a favour. 

It was quite in accord with the universal law of na- 
tions at that time for Him to do this, — the law that has 
been supreme all up the evolution process till very 
recent times, — the law " that he may take who can." 
It was no international wrong for Him to free those 
slaves, as the laws of nations were at that time, but 
neither was it God interfering to right a great interna- 
tional wrong. It was simply God as a great and pow- 
erful friend interfering to help His friends in trouble. 

While the sending of these plagues does not figure 
as an act of punishment on God's part, but merely the 
arbitrary act of a strong friend doing a favour to his 
friends, yet there was an element of punishment asso- 
ciated with it. This is referred to by the Apostle Paul 
when he says that God raised Pharaoh up especially 
for the purpose of exhibiting His wrath upon him 
(Rom. 9 : IT). 



194 THE SUPERNATURAL 

But this punishment was quite a side issue, and did 
not furnish the main purpose of the movement. That 
main purpose was deliverance of His friends, and not 
punishment of injustice that had been inflicted on them. 
Indeed in as far as it was considered to be of the nature 
of punishment it was not punishment for any wrong 
done to the Israelites but punishment of his stubborn- 
ness in resisting God's orders and plans. 

Emphatically it was not punishment for punishment's 
sake either, but punishment for a warning, to make 
people feel that they must not interfere when God un- 
dertakes to assist His friends. If God intentionally 
raised Pharaoh up for that punishment we cannot pos- 
sibly consider that its main purpose was to secure get- 
ting a bad man punished. Its teaching value must 
have been its main meaning. It is the benefit to Israel 
and others that is the real object, not the punishment 
to Pharaoh. 

Using Natural Law 

We may notice in passing a very important point to 
which allusion has already been made. Most of these 
plagues were not supernatural at all in form, in the 
sense that the supernatural is usually defined, namely, 
as something out of the range of the action of the laws 
of nature. They were purely natural events, produced 
entirely by natural causes in the natural way, and 
were events the exact equivalents of which have very 
probably occurred at various other times both be- 
fore and since. Such were the storm, the locusts, the 
murrain and several of the others, — possibly even all of 
them. 



MOSES 195 

And yet they were in the truest sense supernatural 
events, that is to say, they had the same meaning, value 
and force as all the other events in the Bible that are 
called supernatural. The whole movement of the his- 
tory and the esteem of all men classes them in the same 
class with all those other events. 

What gives all of them their special place and mean- 
ing is not that they were done with or without the or- 
dinary operations of nature, but that they were acts of 
God intentionally directed for the benefit of some indi- 
vidual or restricted group. Such these plagues are 
represented to be. They are acts of God intentionally 
and personally directed for the help of the Israelites. 
In this case He used the ordinary operations of nature 
to produce that specialized help, as in other cases He 
used some other means. The means is not essential. 
It is the motive and the object that are essential. 

To us there is special importance in the fact that God 
so used the forces of nature here for that purpose. It 
tends to reassure us, as it did the people of that time 
and of all times, that it does not require a violation of 
the natural order of things for God to bring us some 
help or good if He wishes to do so. It helps us to feel 
that even while all things are running along smoothly 
and unvaryingly in the channels of nature, God can, 
does and is taking individual care of our best in- 
terests, and can, does, and is bringing about events 
with special reference to our good. It is this species 
of the supernatural which is especially suited to bring 
religious comfort and assurance to people of the present 
day. 



196 THE SUPERNATURAL 

Personal Care 

"What was true of the plagues was also true of what 
occurred at the crossing of the Ked Sea and the de- 
struction of Pharaoh's army (Ex. 14 : 21-31). It was 
all brought about by natural causes, but yet it is prop- 
erly called a supernatural event, for it is manifestly 
exhibited as an event specially planned and produced 
by God for the sake of this people which He wished to 
befriend. Also it was not the act of God as moral 
ruler, or a judicial act, but entirely an act of partiality 
and favouritism. God does not profess to be punishing 
the Egyptian army for any wrong they had done to 
Israel, much less to be rewarding Israel for any merit. 
On the contrary it was their improper conduct in mur- 
muring and threatening to rebel that was the immediate 
antecedent of the deliverance. It was not an act of 
judgment but the patience of a long-suffering friend. 

We may group here also a number of incidents that 
occurred at various times all through the journey to 
Canaan. There was the pillar of cloud and fire 
(Ex. 13:21, etc.), the bitter waters healed (Ex. 14: 
23-26), the manna (Ex. 16:4 ff.), the quails (ver. 13), the 
water from the rock (Ex. 17:5, 6). Some of these 
were apparently produced by natural causes and some 
not, but they all alike must be classed as supernatural, 
for they are distinctly recorded as specially and inten- 
tionally brought about by God for their personal benefit 
as His friends. 

Their object was the same as that of all the other 
supernatural, namely, to impress upon the people now 
at this critical time the friendliness, sympathy and ac- 



MOSES 197 

cessibility of God. They were all acts done to care for 
this people and supply their wants, and mostly to sup- 
ply wants that all the large body of people felt person- 
ally and very acutely, as for instance hunger and thirst 
in the desert. 

Such acts would make just the kind of impression it 
was most important to make, and would make it very 
deep and strong. They would make this deep impres- 
sion not merely on a few leaders but on all the people, 
who were all the beneficiaries of the help. And it 
would be remembered and felt by them and by their 
descendants for many generations to come. Such 
supernatural acts were therefore very appropriate for 
the purposes desired, and this was a very appropriate 
and opportune time for their occurrence. 

At Mount Sinai 

Most important of all were the events that occurred 
about Mount Sinai, in connection with the giving of 
the law (Ex. 19 if.). Not only does Moses day after 
day meet and talk with God and receive from Him 
all kinds of communications, but God reveals Him- 
self personally in a most conspicuous way to all the 
people. 

The whole mountain is covered with a veil of smoke 
or cloud for days, with God understood to be veiled 
•within the cloud. From time to time come thunder 
and lightning as tokens of His presence, and at a cer- 
tain time God speaks from the midst of the cloud with 
a mighty voice that all the assembled people could 
hear. Altogether it is by far the most spectacular 



198 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

piece of the supernatural recorded in the Old Testament, 
or indeed in the whole Bible. 

It must have been a most impressive sight and a 
momentous occasion. Here was a great company of 
people, still thrilling with the joy of their recent de- 
liverance from slavery, and looking forward with eager 
expectancy to a career that was before them in a land 
which was to be theirs, and all by the favour and the 
special acts of a great, powerful, unseen God who was 
befriending them. Now amid scenes made up of the 
most impressive natural phenomena they actually meet 
God personally present before them within the mystery 
of the smoke- veiled mountain. As they look He speaks 
to them, and they hear a voice proportioned to the 
greatness and majesty of the rest of the scene. He 
proclaims Himself their God and friend, and enunciates 
ten great fundamental rules for their welfare. 

What we are interested in here is in seeing whether 
all this scene was consistent and appropriate, and 
whether there was a sufficient and appropriate purpose 
for a manifestation of that kind. Was the occasion 
sufficient to warrant such a great display ? Were the 
acts themselves appropriate and fitted to advance some 
purpose that was held by God at that time ? 

The events recorded were certainly very spectacular, 
and in magnitude and impressiveness they were greater 
than occurred at any other time. Just so this was the 
most momentous time in the whole Old Testament 
movement, and the one that would warrant the most 
magnificent display. It was the founding and organiz- 
ing of the nation, — of the body in which the whole 



MOSES 199 

religious movement was to be carried on. That would 
naturally be a time for the most conspicuous displays 
and most impressive manifestations. 

In human affairs it is always so. Men always con- 
sider some kind of special impressive display appro- 
priate at the founding of any important institution. 
Not that God feels the same desire for display as men 
do, for this display was not for God's satisfaction but 
for men's sake, to impress them. And since human 
feeling calls for some such display as appropriate at such 
a time, that was sufficient reason for God granting it. 

But more than that, there was great practical use for 
such a display at this time. The way a project is 
started out may give the bent to all its future course. 
If this nation in the very act of their organization were 
deeply impressed with a peculiarly intimate and friendly 
relation of God towards them, as well as with His 
magnificent and enormous power, that might deeply 
affect all their subsequent history, — as in fact it did. 

If at the time of the founding right tendencies were 
formed and deeply impressed, this would have im- 
mensely more influence than an equal effort to produce 
those right tendencies after wrong tendencies had gained 
headway. If there was ever to be a time when the 
strongest effort should be made to make the right im- 
pressions on them it was now. If God were ever going 
to use supernatural events to make an impression on 
them we would naturally expect that there would be 
such events and a greater number and more striking 
display of them at that time than at any other. 

Were these events appropriate ? What was the pur- 



200 THE SUPERNATURAL 

pose God had in view? Were such" events as these 
suited to impress on the people what He chiefly wanted 
to impress upon them ? 

He wished to make such an impression upon them as 
a nation that they would always feel that He was their 
friend, near them and sympathetically interested in 
them, as well as able to help them. In fact He wanted 
to make such an impression upon them that they would 
feel towards Him very much the same feeling that the 
other nations felt with regard to their special Tutelar 
Deities. 

There is a suggestive thought there that we will do 
well to consider. That sort of feeling was a right 
feeling as far as it went. Felt towards God it is the 
very essence of religion. It is a natural yearning of 
the human heart, and we cannot think that the true 
religion that God shall institute will be less satisfying 
to the yearnings of the human heart that these other, 
mistaken religions. 

God wanted to impress them once for all with the 
reality of His presence and friendly relation specifically 
to them. What more effective way can we conceive 
than by just such a scene as that which occurred at 
Mount Sinai ? They listen to the actual voice of God 
speaking to them. It is a voice of sufficient magnitude 
to impress upon them enormous power and superhuman 
character. At the same time it is speaking to them 
personally, not merely speaking something in general 
for all the world, which they happen to be able to hear. 
It is distinctly personal and restricted to them. It is 
addressing them in the attitude of a friend, and is pref- 



MOSES 201 

aced by a reference to His previous special interest in 
them and favours to them. " I am Jehovah your God, 
who brought you out of the land of Egypt and out of 
the house of bondage " (Ex. 20 : 2). 

It is an actual physical meeting with God, just as 
real and in the same sense as they would meet with 
any human friend. Unlike Abraham's meetings with 
God his friend, God does not here appear in the size 
and form of an ordinary man, but in something greater 
and more majestic. This was appropriate to the new 
conditions. It was a nation that was now concerned. 
The nation now needed to feel that they had a friend 
great and strong enough to be to them the friend that 
they needed as a nation in their conflicts and national 
troubles. The enormous voice of God speaking from 
the heart of the smoke- veiled mountain would produce 
that feeling of majestic power and greatness, while the 
sympathetic, personal note of His speech would still 
impress them that it was a sympathetic friend that was 
so enormously great and strong. 

Unlike Abraham again, they did not see God in any 
visible form. The form of a man would not be appro- 
priate for such an enormous voice, and any other form 
would be out of place. The only reason for ever ap- 
pearing to men in a physical form was in order to 
appear familiar and companionable to them, and that 
could be affected only by a man's form of ordinary 
size. As that would be inappropriate here no form 
was shown. All feeling of abnormalness or lack, how- 
ever, was obviated by having the place of His presence 
veiled with the thick smoke and cloud. 



202 THE SUPERNATURAL 

The whole scene, therefore, is perfectly consistent 
and appropriate. It teaches the lesson which they as 
a nation needed then most to learn. It is specially 
calculated to impress upon them that there was a great 
God who was their ally and helper, that He was a 
being exceedingly grand and powerful, yet sympathetic 
and favourable to them. 

Ruler or Friend ? 

When we come to consider the substance of what 
God says, both now from Sinai and later to Moses, we 
might, at first thought, be disposed to consider that He 
is appearing here as God the great Moral Kuler rather 
than merely as a friend. His communications consist 
chiefly of rules and laws. 

But we must bear in mind that now He is addressing 
them in their capacity as a nation, since it is the occa- 
sion of the founding of the nation. He is not speaking 
to them as individuals that may be restricted and re- 
strained by those laws, but as a nation to which laws 
are the sinews of life. As a nation He is herein giving 
them the food to sustain their national life, just as at 
another time He gave them manna to sustain individual 
physical life. Both acts may be assigned to the same 
class, as gifts of kindness and friendship. 

Or again, we notice that Moses is represented as in 
daily consultation with God over the affairs of the na- 
tion, just like a subordinate in consultation with his 
chief. He goes out day by day to the appointed place 
of meeting, there he confers directly with God, receives 
instructions and is directed by Him, and gradually 



MOSES 203 

elaborates the system of government and religious rit- 
ual for the nation. This would seem to mean, — as in- 
deed is often explicitly declared later, — that God claims 
to be the immediate head and ruler of this newly or- 
ganized nation. At first thought this would also seem 
to be a contradiction of our theory that God in the 
supernatural stands always in the attitude of friend 
and helper. Here He seems to be standing in the atti- 
tude of ruler. 

It is true He does appear as ruler here, and He claims 
that place all through the history of Israel. But we 
must notice a fundamental difference between this rela- 
tion of ruler and the relation of God as the moral ruler 
of the world. It is not as the impartial judge and sov- 
ereign moral ruler of the whole world that He appears 
here, but as the specific ruler of this one nation. He 
appears not as the impartial arbiter of all nations but 
as the partisan of this one, completely identified with 
their interests even when they antagonize the equally 
just interests of other nations. Moreover if we count 
that the ideal ruler exists for the sake of the nation and 
not the nation for the sake of the ruler, it is fair to take 
that value as the value of the relation of God here in 
His proposed perfect rule of this nation of Israel. 

It is not an exception then, but just a higher instance 
of the same fact of God in the supernatural always ap- 
pearing in a friendly personal relation, giving some 
benefit. This was the highest way in which He could 
come into personal relations with this nation, and the 
highest kind of friendship and greatest benefit He could 
give to it as a nation. 



204 THE STJPEKNATUKAL 

Other Incidents 

Other supernatural incidents of this travel period, 
such as the miraculous judgment of Korah, Dathan 
and Abiram (Num. 16), and of the priests Nadab 
and Abihu (Lev. 10 : 1-2), grow directly and neces- 
sarily out of this relation of God as chief of the nation. 
They were severe on the individuals concerned, but 
they were necessary for the welfare of the whole na- 
tion, and so are to be classed as benefits, not evils. If 
laws are to be valued as benefits the execution of those 
laws must also be rated as benefits. 

One little incident, the miraculous healing of persons 
bitten by serpents through looking at the brazen ser- 
pent lifted up on a pole (Num. 21 : 6-9), was used by 
Jesus (John 3 : 14, 15), as a type of the free gift of 
Eternal Life that every one that would look to Him 
should receive. This and all the other wilderness mira- 
cles have the one aspect and meaning of God meeting 
men on a human plane in a friendly attitude bringing 
personal favours. 

There were some little side incidents connected with 
Baalam and Balak (Num. 22-24) that contain cases of 
the supernatural. It would emphasize to the people 
the thoroughness of God's care for them to see Him 
thus on their behalf interfering in the affairs of other 
nations. The incidents also seem to imply that, though 
unrecorded in the Bible, God probably at times made 
personal revelations and had personal contact with oth- 
ers outside of the people of Israel, though only sporad- 
ically and not in the organized manner that He did so 
in Israel. If there were even occasionally thus such 



MOSES 205 

revelations to other peoples it would make it seem still 
easier to justify the one long special dealing with this 
special people. 

The first supernatural event in this connection was 
the appearance to Balaam by dream with reference to 
his going to Balak (Num. 22 : 9-20). The fact that 
God first forbade him to go and later allowed him to 
go because He saw his heart was set on it, is not con- 
trary to what we know God's attitude to men is. It 
shows God, however, not in His attitude of absolute 
sovereign ruler, but rather in the attitude of friendly, 
indulgent over-lord. It is a human relation, not a 
divine one, and governed by human considerations in a 
very human way. Though He is sovereign with au- 
thority, yet He acts rather by way of persuasion and 
advice, and in such an attitude as to invite the freedom 
of fellowship rather than forced obedience. 

On the way going to Balak we have the extremely 
curious incident of the ass speaking to Balaam with a 
human voice, and an angel appearing (vers. 22-35). 
This incident, — making an ass speak, — seems so crude 
and inconsistent with the dignity of the ruler of the uni- 
verse that we are inclined to set it aside as certainly 
merely a folk tale or myth. 

But we should remember that this was before the 
days of automobiles and wireless telegraph, and the ass 
was a much more honoured member of the household 
than now. Anyway it is not as ruler of the universe 
that God deals with man in these supernatural acts, but 
as friend, and expressly to impress His friendliness 
and approachableness. So the more homely the act 



206 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

the more appropriate, as it would have the more 
value for impressing the relation of companionable 
friend. 

Two or three other miracles in the early part of 
Joshua's career, such as the crossing of the Jordan 
(Josh. 3 : 14-17), the taking of Jericho (Josh. 6 : 15-21), 
the vision of the armed man (Josh. 5 : 13-15), and the 
like, naturally belong in this group. They are still 
connected with the organizing and establishing of the 
nation. Like all the others their import is to impress 
the friendly help and accessibility of God. Jehovah as 
an armed champion was the real leader of the great 
enterprise that was to get them a land to dwell in. A 
miraculous entrance into the land and a miraculous 
taking of the first city in it and other subsequent 
miraculous help, were suggestive of what He intended 
to do for them all through the enterprise, — namely, to 
open up all barriers and subdue everything before them. 

The Fundamental Question 
Such is the form and such the meaning of this bril- 
liant cluster of supernatural events which accompanied 
the organization of this nation which God proposed to 
use in such a special way. They are all consistent and 
appropriate, provided only God's purpose was such as 
we have maintained that it was, — provided religion is 
primarily a personal social relation between men and 
God, — and provided God's purpose in religion and in 
this enterprise with the people of Israel was not merely 
to elevate the moral character of the world, and get a 
set of high and useful laws accepted and adopted, but 



MOSES 207 

to establish a friendly, trustful social relation between 
people and Himself. 

If religion is fellowship with God, and God had 
singled out this people of Israel for the purpose of 
cultivating a high and close state of fellowship with 
them, it would be strange indeed if in such a special 
time as this, the most critical in all their history, He 
did not give them some special manifestation of His 
friendliness and personal interest. It would be strange 
if He did not do something so evident that they would 
unquestionably recognize it and vividly feel it, and 
something of such a nature that it would tend to pro- 
duce in them a feeling of loyalty, trust and fellowship 
all through their future. It would be strange if God 
did not give some special manifestations for that pur- 
pose, and it would be hard to imagine any manifesta- 
tions better adapted to serve that purpose than just 
these that are recorded here in this Moses narrative. 

There is nothing strange or hard to believe in any 
of this, provided only we recognize the supernatural as 
one of the accepted factors of history. There is really 
the crucial question. Such things do not occur ap- 
parently now, and with our scientific and matter-of- 
fact minds it is so hard to vividly imagine their occur- 
ring that accounts of them seem unreal to us. 

But the question of the supernatural is not a small, 
indifferent matter. The whole fabric of our devotional 
religion depends on it. The whole movement of con- 
version, faith and inner Christian experience implies 
special personal acts and relations of God. All answer 
to prayer is necessarily of the nature of the super- 



208 THE SUPEKNATUBAL 

natural. It is so even if the answer comes entirely 
through natural means, or if the whole affair is entirely 
in the mental and unseen sphere. If God gives any 
benefit really because it is asked for and as a personal 
favour to the asker, it is just as supernatural as the 
majestic voice from Sinai. If He does not, then prayer 
is a sham and a self-deception. It cannot have value 
even as good spiritual calisthenics, for what healthy 
spiritual benefit can come from mockery and deception ? 

The trouble with most of us is that we do believe 
in the supernatural ourselves, but many men whose 
opinions we greatly respect do not believe it possible, 
and so we would like to reduce the volume of the 
conspicuously supernatural in our religion as much as 
possible, so as to avoid rousing their prejudices. 

But cowardice never wins battles. If the supernat- 
ural is a fact it not only demands our belief, but it is a 
valuable factor in the fabric of knowledge and life. 
We ought to rejoice in it and give it our enthusiastic 
allegiance, just as much as men of science do with 
strange and revolutionary scientific facts. 



V 

ELIJAH 

FKOM this time of the organization of the nation, 
on through some five long centuries, again we 
have only a few sporadic and inconspicuous 
cases of the supernatural occurring. Aside from some 
things that would more properly be considered under 
the class of prophecy, the list is very short, and they 
all had their appropriate meaning and use at the time. 

There was the angel appearing to Gideon (Judg. 
6 : 11 ff.), and the homely little test of the dew on the 
fleece (vers. 36-40) at the time of a great defection and 
a great deliverance. There was the angel appearing to 
announce the birth of Samson, who did such remark- 
able deeds against the Philistine oppressors (Judg. 
13 : 3 ff.). In the time of Eli, when the Ark, the symbol 
of Jehovah's presence, was taken away out of the coun- 
try by the Philistines, there were some supernatural 
signs and plagues on the Philistines (1 Sam. 5), and 
some signs when the Ark was again sent back to its 
own country (1 Sam. 6), to which we may add the sign 
of judgment upon Uzzah (2 Sam. 6 : 7), when it was to 
be brought up to the capital of the country in the time 
of David. 

There were God's call to Samuel and some other 
special signs (1 Sam. 3, etc.), during the period when a 

209 



210 THE SUPEKNATUBAL 

critical change was to be made, and the government 
become that of a kingdom. At the time when the 
temple was dedicated there was a sign of acceptance in 
a cloud filling the building (1 Kings 8 : 10, 11). At 
the time of Jeroboam's setting up false worship he was 
denounced by a prophet, and as a sign his hand was 
withered and then restored (1 Kings 13 : 4—6). 

All these supernatural signs were quite homely and 
unobtrusive, and not much of a list to be scattered over 
more than five hundred years. If God was personally 
promoting this enterprise of training Israel, and if the 
essential thing was to win them to a confirmed state of 
fellowship and trust in Himself as their great friend, 
the wonder is not that there were so many, but that in 
the long stretch of five centuries there were so few of 
these supernatural acts to make vivid to them His 
friendly presence. 

All at Special Times 
They all came at times of crisis or importance in 
their history. The first, under Gideon, came at a time 
when the nomadic Midianite hordes had invaded the 
country in such force as to threaten to destroy them 
out of the land, as they themselves in a somewhat simi- 
lar way had supplanted the former inhabitants of the 
country. The second, in connection with Samson, came 
at the time when the strong Philistine nation was be- 
ginning to spread its power over them, and threaten- 
ing to destroy or absorb them. In both these cases the 
report spreading through the country that their God 
had granted a supernatural appearance to some one 



ELIJAH 211 

would have great influence to encourage the people 
against the foes that threatened both their nation and 
their religion, and it would kindle anew in many fickle 
hearts the feeling of trust and loyalty to their great 
patron Jehovah. 

The third was when these same Philistines had ad- 
vanced their power by a great victory, and had carried 
away the Ark, the sacred emblem of Jehovah's pres- 
ence and friendship. The supernatural features exhib- 
ited here were quite significant. In the first place the 
presence of the Ark brought only disaster and suffer- 
ing to the Philistines, seeming to indicate that the God 
which it represented was the partisan of the Israelites 
still. The remarkable circumstances of the return 
seemed to indicate unequivocally that it was Israel to 
which He gave His favours. The judgment of those 
who handled it with rude curiosity was suited to im- 
press the sacredness of the personality that was there 
represented. In the judgment that fell on Uzzah when 
the Ark was removed later to Jerusalem, the same les- 
son was taught, of the sacredness and majesty of the 
Jehovah whose token it was. This, though severe, was 
really a friendly advice that it was very necessary and 
valuable for the nation to receive. 

During the period when a kingdom was being first 
established, and the nature of the government changed 
to the unified rule of a visible sovereign, in the time of 
Samuel, it was very appropriate that this great change 
should not take place without some supernatural re- 
minders of the presence and continued friendly and 
helpful relations of Jehovah. Of course it was appro- 



212 THE SUPEBNATUKAL 

priate that there should be some visible sign of God's 
presence when the national worship was being perma- 
nently established in adequate form in the capital. 
And it was quite appropriate that the religious defec- 
tion or heresy of Jeroboam, which was ultimately to 
alienate a large part of the nation from God entirely, 
should not be allowed to pass without some supernat- 
ural protest. 

The Geeat Ceisis 

We now come to another, and the last brilliant clus- 
ter of miracles in the Old Testament. We find that it 
came at a time of great crisis for the cause, only second 
in its importance to the time of Moses when the nation 
was founded with such a brilliant display. It was the 
time of Elijah and Elisha. 

The nation was inundated with an overwhelming in- 
vasion of a rival religion, that seemed likely to blot out 
the Jehovah religion entirely. Not only the northern 
tribes, but the more loyal southern nation of Judah as 
well, were ruled by sovereigns zealous for the Baal 
worship, and so thoroughly had the great mass of the 
people been carried over to the new allegiance that the 
prophet Elijah honestly believed that he was almost 
the only one left in all the land really loyal to Jehovah 
(cf. 1 Kings 19 : 10). It must have been a very critical 
time for the cause indeed. No wonder then if this was 
one of the times God chose for a numerous and bril- 
liant display of these acts that revealed His friendly 
presence. 

The supernatural events of this group may be roughly 
divided into two classes. Those in the first class were 






ELIJAH 213 

severe and conspicuous, those in the second class mild, 
beneficent and more private. Those in the first class 
concerned the nation or groups of people, those in the 
second chiefly individuals. Those in the first class may- 
be considered as addressed to the nation, to win it back 
to organized allegiance to its protector, God. Those 
in the second class may be considered as intended to 
invite individuals into the relation of trust and friend- 
ship. This division, however, is not very strictly main- 
tained, as a number of the occurrences would not cor- 
respond to it. 

Conspicuous in the first class are the famine that 
Elijah foretold (1 Kings 17 : 1 ff.), the fiery test on 
Carmel (1 Kings 18 : 30 ff.), and his calling down fire 
from heaven to slay the soldiers sent against him 
(2 Kings 1 : 9-12). It has been suggested that as Baal 
was considered to be especially the lord of fire and of 
the sun, God's using these as the medium of chastising 
signs was sarcastically directed at the Baal worship. 
At any rate they were adapted to impress God's great 
power and make the people feel how desirable it was 
to be under the friendship and protection of such a 
strong God. 

Elijah himself is represented as being carried up by 
a chariot of fire to heaven (2 Kings 2:11), but at 
Horeb, although the enormous force of the earth- 
quake, storm and fire went before as signs, it was not 
in these but in the gentle, quiet voice of friendly fellow- 
ship that God made His real approach to Elijah (1 Kings 
19:12). 

Three others of the supernatural events were of 



214 THE SUPERNATUKAL 

national significance. In one the army of Israel was 
saved from perishing of thirst by water furnished in 
a mysterious way in ditches dug in the valley, and 
a great victory gained over the Moabites (2 Kings 
3 : 13 ff.). In another, after revealing to his king the 
stratagems of the Syrian king, Elisha strikes the Syrian 
soldiers sent to capture him with blindness and leads 
them to his own king at Samaria (2 Kings 6 : 8-23). 
In the third, by making them hear a mysterious noise 
God frightened the Syrian army besieging Samaria 
and caused them to flee and raise the siege (2 Kings 
6 : 24 ff .). 

All these incidents represent Jehovah as the patron 
and partisan of the Israelite nation, for of course there 
was no question of right or justice concerned either 
way according to the accepted law of nations at that 
time. In the first case there was first a protest made 
that after their shabby treatment of their protector 
Jehovah they ought not to have the face to expect Him 
to help them now, and yet for all that He does help 
them. 

A rather peculiar incident is the case of the crowd 
of boys that was attacked by bears after ridiculing 
the prophet Elisha near Bethel (1 Kings 2 : 23, 24). 
Though our sympathies are touched, perhaps, by the 
youth of the offenders, yet the meaning of the occur- 
rence was practically the same as of the judgment on 
Uzzah (2 Sam. 6 : 2), on the Bethshemesh men (1 Sam. 
6:19), or on ISTadab and Abihu (Lev. 10:2). There 
must have been a large crowd of the young men al- 
together if as many as forty-two received injuries. 



ELIJAH 215 

They must have represented a very bitter and deter- 
mined element opposed to Jehovah, as otherwise, after 
all his spectacular experiences, a crowd of boys would 
surely have hailed Elisha as a famous hero instead of 
ridiculing him, for that is boy nature. 

Really there was nothing outside of nature in what 
the bears did, and we are not told that Elisha even pre- 
dicted any such thing, yet probably we would be right 
in including this among the supernatural events. At 
least as such it would not be inappropriate. 

Of the quieter, individual events several concern the 
prophet himself. There was the feeding of Elijah by 
ravens at the brook (1 Kings 17 : 6), the angel at the 
juniper tree in the wilderness (1 Kings 19 : 5-8), the 
crossing of the Jordan (2 Kings 2 : 8), and the re- 
crossing again by Elisha after the ascension of Elijah 
(ver. 14). All these were simple little acts of personal 
care, excellently adapted to impress the friendly, con- 
genial attitude of God towards those that seek to be in 
that relation with Him. 

The remainder of these events were mostly with 
humble individuals. There was the meal and oil 
multiplied to sustain the widow of Zarephath (1 Kings 
IT : 14-16), her son restored to life (vers. 17-24), the 
water supply of the prophets in Jericho made good 
(2 Kings 2 : 19-22), the prophet's widow aided by mul- 
tiplying her cruse of oil (2 Kings 4 : 1-7), the son of 
Elisha's Shunemite hostess restored to life (vers. 8-37), 
the ax recovered (2 Kings 6 : 4-7), the poisoning of 
the prophets healed (2 Kings 4 : 38-41), and the in- 
cident of Naaman (2 Kings 5 : 1 ff.). 



216 THE SUPERNATURAL 

Resteicted to a Special Group 
It will be noticed that with the exception of the last 
all of these were in aid of some member of the order 
of the prophets or of some one who had conspicuously 
favoured the prophet himself. This is so marked that 
it must be given value as a feature of the case. Re- 
member that it was a time of very wide defection. 
These " Sons of the prophets," whatever their other 
characteristics, were certainly a body of people loyally 
attached to Jehovah in the midst of the defection. 
These therefore specially represent the " Friends " to 
whom God might be expected to show Himself 
friendly. That He does single these out for the almost 
exclusive objects of His favours marks these events as 
not general benevolence but acts of personal fellowship 
and friendship with distinct meaning. 

The healing of Naaman was a conspicuous event, and 
it was not done for any member or friend of the pro- 
phetic order. In this respect it is an exception among 
the private miracles. But it is an exception that proves 
the rule or impresses the same lesson that all the 
others do. 

It is not done to one of the prophetic order who were 
faithful to Jehovah, but neither is it done to one of the 
other people of Israel who were so largely unloyal. It 
is done to some one outside of Israel entirely. It 
looks as if God wanted to show that He was still ac- 
cessible in a friendly spirit when sought by others be- 
sides those in the prophetic order, but purposely refused 
to do the friendly act to those who had specifically 
violated the laws of friendship by their disloyalty, 



ELIJAH 217 

and went outside entirely to find some one to do the 
act to. 

Notice that Jesus uses this incident and that of the 
widow of Sarepta to point this very lesson (Luke 4 : 
25-27), illustrating the fact that Jesus could not do the 
acts of blessing and friendship He wished to do to His 
old neighbours who ought to have been His best friends 
but had to go outside to other strange communities to 
do them. 

After the death of Elisha there is the account of a 
dead man raised to life when his body touched the 
bones of the dead prophet (2 Kings 13 : 21). Such an 
incident as that would be calculated to bring very 
vividly again before the mind and feelings of the peo- 
ple the departed prophet and all that his life and 
teaching stood for. It is that aspect which gives it 
its appropriateness. 

Later Instances 
From this time on, during the following seven long 
centuries we have only about half a dozen records of 
supernatural incidents. There were two or three in 
the time of Hezekiah, — his healing (2 Kings 20 : 1-7), 
the sign on the sun-dial (vers. 8, 9), and his deliverance 
from the Assyrian army (2 Kings 19 : 35, 36). King 
Uzziah was smitten with leprosy for sacrilege (2 Chron. 
26 : 16-19). There were two or three in the Babylonian 
captivity, — Daniel's interpretation of dreams (Dan. 2 : 
25 ff.), his deliverance in the lion's den (Dan. 6 : 16-23), 
the deliverance of the three men in the fire (Dan. 3 : 
21-27), and the handwriting on the wall (Dan. 5). 



218 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

The second and third of these well typify the condition 
of the faithful Jews in the midst of enemies, and would 
be well calculated to assure and comfort their hearts 
with the feeling that their mighty friend could and 
would still protect them. They were very appropriate 
to the situation. The interpretation of dreams would 
more appropriately be considered in connection with 
prophecy. The handwriting on the wall spoke doom 
to the kingdom of Babylon, but that doom was closely 
connected with their opposition to the people of Je- 
hovah and was a means to their rescue later. 

The time of Hezekiah was a time of great revival and 
return to God after serious defection. The supernatu- 
ral acts were all favours to King Hezekiah who was 
the prime mover in this return to God. There were 
two quiet private favours, the healing of his disease 
and the sun-dial sign, and one conspicuous public fa- 
vour, the relief by the destruction of the Assyrian 
army. 

The occasion was certainly important enough to 
warrant some display of special friendliness by God 
who was so much interested in the return of the people 
to friendly fellowship. Hezekiah was the representa- 
tive man to whom it was appropriate that the favours 
should be shown. And the acts done were quite ap- 
propriate also. 

Perhaps they were not exactly what we would have 
done to exhibit approval under the circumstances, espe- 
cially the first two, — the healing and the sun-dial sign. 
We would have had something more flashy and recon- 
dite. But that was the kind God wanted. For He 



ELIJAH 219 

considered the homely, sympathetic, human quality of 
His kindness the most important thing of all. That 
was the thing best adapted to arouse in us the kind of 
feelings He wished us to have towards Him. 

Thus from beginning to end we see that these special 
incidents in the Bible to which we give the name 
Miracles have all one character and one motive. They 
are all merely acts of God done personally to individ- 
uals or to one single nation. The motive of them all 
is just to show kindness and friendship to some one 
whom God wished to befriend. In every case they 
came at an appropriate time when it was important 
that such a display of God's personal friendship should 
be seen. And in every case the nature of the act was 
quite appropriate for the purpose God had in view. 
It is all just God the great friend showing practical 
friendship to persons He had pledged Himself to be- 
friend, and the intention of it all is to invite and draw 
us also to enter into that same relation of friendship 
with Him. 



VI 
PROPHECY 

THE next form of the supernatural to consider 
is Prophecy. In considering this the main 
problem is not how future events could be fore- 
told or if it is possible or reasonable that they should 
be. Foretelling future events is merely an incidental 
detail in prophecy. In our colloquial usage the term 
prophecy has come to be confined chiefly to that one 
matter of foretelling future events, but the prophecy 
of the Bible is something far broader than that. Fore- 
telling the future does occur more or less in the proph- 
ecies, but it is chiefly for practical effect in warning 
and encouragement, and merely incidental in most 
cases. 

The prophet was a man who professed to speak 
something which he had received directly from God. 
He claimed that God had put into his mind certain 
thoughts which he merely proclaimed to the people. 
The essential part of prophecy then was God communi- 
cating thoughts to men. If that really occurred then 
prophecy was a fact. 

It is easy to juggle with words and obscure a defini- 
tion. We may say that all truth is really God's 
thoughts, that all discovery is merely receiving God's 
thoughts or thinking God's thoughts after Him. 

220 



PEOPHECY 221 

Therefore any high, advanced thinking might be called 
receiving God's thoughts, and so prophecy. But this 
is merely an evasion. In practice we recognize certain 
definite ways of getting new thoughts. We may get 
new thoughts by perceiving and studying things. We 
may get new thoughts by putting our previous thoughts 
together and reasoning about them. But we may also 
get new thoughts without either of these processes if 
some other person has the thoughts or knowledge, and 
communicates it to us by speaking, writing or some 
other way. 

This last is what we mean here with regard to God. 
He had a thought that He wished some man to have 
and actively communicated that thought to him in the 
same sense that another man would communicate his 
thoughts to him. The question is, — has God done 
that ? Did He do it as He is represented to do it in 
the Bible? 

Inspiration 

While that is what we must consider prophecy to be 
if we follow the traditional conception, there is another 
somewhat similar process that we ought to consider in 
this same connection. We may conceive that God 
wishes a man to have a certain thought or conviction. 
He does not communicate it to him directly but He 
intentionally and specifically brings such influence to 
bear upon his mind that by the processes of his own in- 
vestigation and thinking he gets that thought or con- 
viction. 

The influences that God thus brought to bear on the 
man's mind might be greater or less, they might be 



222 THE SUPERNATURAL 

supernatural or all natural in form. This would not 
be particularly significant. The only important condi- 
tion is that God specifically wishes a given man to get 
a certain thought and He takes definite personal meas- 
ures of some kind which are instrumental in his getting 
that thought. He would not have gotten it without 
this special something that God did, and God did that 
something specifically for the purpose of causing that 
man to get that thought. 

This differs from prophecy in the point that God 
does not communicate any thought as a thought to the 
man, and the man gets no thought that he has not 
worked out by his own mind processes. But it re- 
sembles prophecy in the point that God wishes the 
man to have the given thought and takes definite 
special steps to that end so that the man gets a thought 
that he would not have gotten if God had not done 
what He did to make him get it. 

This latter process is what is very commonly con- 
ceived as the meaning of the term Inspiration. For 
the most part what is said below as to the meaning 
and purpose of prophecy would apply equally to this 
also. 

Many, perhaps, would wish to resolve all prophecy 
into a matter of this nature and define it in this way. 
They seem to imagine that a process of this kind would 
be a less objectionable kind of supernatural than that 
which is assumed in the ordinary conception of prophecy 
as an actual communication of thoughts by God. It 
is possible to conceive that this kind of helpful stim- 
ulating and directive influence by God may be going 



PEOPHECY 223 

on now in the common experience of Christians, 
unperceived but none the less real. It would there 
fore by its frequency and present occurrence lay claim 
to being a part of natural law and not supernatural 
at all. 

But it would be altogether a logical blunder to count 
this kind of a process less supernatural or easier to 
justify than the other actual communication of thoughts 
consciously recognized to be received from without and 
from God. If this unconscious manipulating, stimulat- 
ing and guiding of men's minds is a specific personal 
act of God it is most distinctly a supernatural act, 
whether it is recognized as such or not. And if it is 
done solely to get some truth discovered that men 
would not otherwise have discovered, it is a super- 
natural act that would be difficult to justify or account 
for without impeaching God's competency in the evolu- 
tion process. 

Mental facts are just as much a part of nature and 
just as much controlled by the evolution process and 
natural law as physical facts are. Any intrusion or 
special manipulating of them is just as supernatural as 
if it were visible material things that were being ma- 
nipulated. If for instance God brought any influence to 
bear personally and intentionally upon the mind of the 
Persian king to lead him to permit the Israelites to go 
back from Babylon it would be in every respect just 
as supernatural as if He by great spectacular plagues 
and signs delivered them from the king of Egypt. If 
God personally contributed any mental stimulus or 
brought any influence intentionally to bear on the 



224 THE SUPEKNATUBAL 

mind of Isaiah to widen his vision and deepen his 
insight so that he could read more correctly the signs 
of the times and give valuable advice to the people, it 
would not be in any respect less supernatural than it 
would be for God to make a great voice sound from 
the cloud on Mount Sinai speaking the Ten Command- 
ments. 

The Supernatural Must be Evident in Order 
to be Justifiable 

It is a naive kind of ignorance which counts that if a 
supernatural act can be so sly and inconspicuous as to 
slip through without being noticed we must let it go un- 
challenged. Keally a supernatural act that was un- 
recognized as such or unconsciously received would be 
harder to account for and justify than one that was 
open and evident. It is precisely through its being 
recognized as a supernatural act that it finds its justifi- 
cation by becoming a contribution to fellowship. We 
have seen that it is impossible to justify any super- 
natural act done primarily to improve men's condition 
or teach some undiscovered truth or for any other 
merely utilitarian purpose since it would impeach God's 
competence as Creator. The only ground on which 
we can justify and account for any supernatural act is 
as an act of fellowship done by God, and in order to 
have value as fellowship of course it must be recognized 
as a special personal act of God, that is as super- 
natural. 

A definite communication received and recognized 
as being from God, just such as it is traditionally con 



PEOPHECY 225 

sidered the prophets experienced, would be a most 
natural and appropriate act of fellowship and so per- 
fectly justifiable whether any moral, social or political 
benefit came from it or not. But an unconscious and 
unrecognized heightening and directing of some man's 
thought powers to lead him to discover truths just be- 
cause they were of great economic importance would 
be an interposition that it would be very difficult to 
justify. 

Such heightening and directing of men's thought 
processes as is assumed in inspiration could indeed be 
justified if it was done so as to be evident and was 
popularly recognized and believed to be really the work 
of God. In that case it would have the same value as 
prophecy and thereby be justifiable. Historically just 
that kind of help from God has been believed by Chris- 
tians to have been granted in connection with the books 
of the Bible, and that help so granted has made a 
strong impression on men's minds as an act of fellow- 
ship. So assuming that such help was really so given 
all conditions are fulfilled to constitute it real fellow- 
ship and thus fully justify it. But if it had not been 
so believed and recognized as a work of God there 
would be no grounds on which we could well justify it. 
For it is precisely its effect on men's minds that consti- 
tutes it fellowship and so justifiable. 

The traditional view, therefore, of both prophecy 
and inspiration really meets the requ: cements of sci- 
ence and evolution philosophy far better than any of 
the modern attempts that have been made to improve 
or replace it. 



226 THE SUPEENATTTEAL 

Didactic Writings 

It is under this latter head, or Inspiration, that we 
may consider all the poetical and didactic portions of 
the Old Testament, such as the Psalms, Proverbs, Ec- 
clesiastes or Job, to be entitled to be called super- 
natural. In as far as God was concerned directly or 
indirectly in assisting in their production and is frankly 
recognized to be so, they are a contribution to the one 
great enterprise of fellowship. All that is said about 
the miracles or prophecy would apply equally to them. 
As far as they teach, warn or inspire men to better 
living it is an act of kindness, and an act of kindness 
that God was concerned in, and so a contribution of 
friendship and fellowship by Him to us. 

It is a significant circumstance and unquestionably a 
fact that in the use Christians in past generations have 
made of these compositions the thought of their origin 
being from God has been a paramount factor in the 
influence which the writings have had upon them. It 
is that which has really carried to them far more 
benefit and comfort than they would have received 
from the bare intrinsic substance of the things written. 
When they were reading them they felt that they were 
reading God's word, and that touch with God has 
always been the chief value of the Bible to the Chris- 
tian heart. 

As proof of this we may notice that many of these 
same precepts and truths can be found in the writings 
of Confucius, Gautama, Epictetus and other religious 
teachers and sages, but we have nothing like the same 
feeling in reading them there that we have in reading 



PEOPHECY 227 

them in their setting in the Bible with all the atmos- 
phere of divine nearness surrounding them there. His- 
torically it has always been the fellowship touch with 
God believed to be in them which has really consti- 
tuted the greater part of their power and value. 

Credibility of Prophecy 
We need hardly stop to go into the question of the 
possibility of such communication as is implied in 
prophecy. One of the startling discoveries of recent 
years is the possibility of direct thought transference 
from mind to mind independent of physical means. 
Naturally a discovery so revolutionary finds many men 
still sceptical, as is true also of many other important 
scientific facts. But when scores of men in the very 
highest rank of scientists declare unequivocally their 
belief that the reception of thoughts or mental influ- 
ence by one mind directly from another mind is a 
demonstrated fact we are at least in good scientific 
company when we presume that a man's mind may re- 
ceive thoughts equally directly from the mind of God. 
We may notice also that in the investigations of this 
phenomenon of direct thought transference it is ac- 
cepted as a rule that the most favourable condition to 
receive such influence is that condition of mind that is 
called by such names as " Secondary," " Subconscious " 
or the like, and which is seen in hypnotism and in the 
spontaneous states of trance, catalepsy vision and the 
like. The state of dreaming also is closely allied to 
these. And just these states of trance, vision or dream 
were the states in which most commonly these prophets 



228 THE SUPERNATURAL 

professed that they received their communications from 
God. 

From the standpoint of their possibility or plausibil- 
ity we need have no embarrassment therefore about 
the prophecies. If we believe in a living, thinking 
God, He not only could give these communications to 
men, but science, under some such term as Telepathy 
or Thought-transference, is just now insisting upon the 
existence of parallel or equivalent phenomena occur- 
ring now in the field of natural life, occurring moreover 
under conditions very similar to those in which these 
ancient prophecies were received. 

But really the serious objection against the occurrence 
of prophecy is not that God could not but that He 
would not do such things. Especially if the com- 
munications were for practical effect in teaching and 
training the people there are most weighty objections 
against supposing that God should do a supernatural 
act for such a purpose. 

The whole wide book of nature is God's teaching. 
The whole course of evolution and all the movement of 
history is a course of training and discipline. These 
are the means that God designed and provided expressly 
for the purpose of teaching and training, and wonder- 
fully effective means they have proved to be. It is 
inconceivable that after providing means so very 
efficient to produce these results He should think it 
necessary right in the midst of the process to break in 
by special interpositions of supernatural teaching and 
training to secure the same object. 

We have already considered this same question at 



PEOPHECY 229 

some length with reference to the miracles. We saw 
that they could not be justified if given merely to 
benefit the world or to certify and attest some teaching. 
The miracles all found their justification in their 
intrinsic character as acts of kindness done by God to 
individuals for the sake of fellowship. It is there also 
that we must look for the justification of prophecy. 
It is all to be interpreted as fellowship bestowed by 
God, and therein it finds its justification and reason- 
ableness. 

But it may be objected that the very substance of 
the prophecy is teaching. That is its intrinsic character. 
It would seem here as though God was certainly break- 
ing in by a special interposition to do what He had 
made full provision for in the machinery of nature. 

This would be so if these prophecies stood alone with 
this as their only meaning. There would be some 
reason for this charge if for instance they had been 
given like the Mormon Bible professed to be given, 
miraculously written on plates of gold and left for 
some one to find and proclaim to the world at large. 
Or again to some extent there would be reason for the 
charge if these prophecies had not been confined to 
Israel but had been given sporadically and independ- 
ently to individuals scattered through all the nations. 

Place in God's Plan 

That very question is often asked. Why do we not 

equally have the same kind of prophecies now ? Why 

were these prophecies confined to the one people 

Israel? If God really does such things why would 



230 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

He not do them equally for all nations and for people 
of the present time as much as for that one ancient 
nation long ago ? 

Eight there is the essential fact and the key to the 
whole problem. These prophecies are not isolated, 
independent facts but are parts and necessary parts of 
a great movement and system. The specialness of 
Israel was an essential feature of the movement. It is 
entirely in that they were given to this special people 
Israel that these prophecies find their justification. 

God did not interpose to supernaturally give teaching 
or training for the world that the world could not have 
gotten otherwise. The real character and genesis of the 
prophecies is not that but something else. As an act of 
fellowship Gfod had assumed and was carrying forward 
a specialized relation of friendship and communion 
with this particular nation Israel. In pursuance of that 
fellowship He did various appropriate things. 

One thing always appropriate for fellowship is 
conversation, communicating ideas from one to the 
other. We carry on conversation just for the social 
touch and fellowship. That is what all the prophecies 
are. Of course it does not make it any less essentially 
an act of fellowship that the ideas communicated are 
profitable, as teaching, training or in some other way. 
All God's conversations we may be sure will consist of 
matter that is useful and instructive, and yet it is none 
the less truly conversation for fellowship's sake. That 
is the fundamental purpose for which it was given. It 
was not to reveal to men new truths but to make them 
feel His presence with them and yearning care for them. 



PEOPHECY 231 

CONVEKSATION BEGUN AT SlNAI 

At the very beginning of His fellowship with them 
as a nation God spoke to them at Sinai with an audible 
voice that they could near (Deut. 4 : 12), just as they 
would hear the voice of a friend in conversation, 
though of course with the majesty and volume befit- 
ting the circumstances. 

That the words spoken at Sinai were the Ten Com- 
mandments is not the important thing, for there was 
no new revelation in any of those commandments. 
There was nothing in them, at least in the ethical part, 
but what had been recognized and enforced as law in all 
that region for hundreds of years. What was signifi- 
cant was that God was personally speaking to them. 
Even though the words He spoke were well known 
and recognized principles, we often open conversation 
with a friend by some obvious, commonplace remark. 
God was so to speak, opening conversation with them 
as an act of fellowship. That was the real epoch- 
making significance of Sinai. 

Was then that conversation stopped as soon as 
begun ? Through all the succeeding hundreds of years 
in which He still wished them to feel Him in personal 
fellowship with them was there no further continuation 
of that conversation ? 

There are many and obvious reasons why a frequent 
repetition of the stupendous voice of Sinai would 
be neither appropriate nor helpful to them (Deut. 
5 : 23-28 ; 18 : 16). But it would be both appropriate 
and helpful if they could have cause to feel that that 
conversation was still being carried on and God was 



232 THE SUPEKNATUKAL 

still continuously in friendly conversation and social 
touch with them, provided it could be done in some 
way that would not interfere with the natural normal- 
ness of their daily lives. 

Can we think of a way that would be more natural 
and appropriate and less obtrusive than the way repre- 
sented here, namely, by God in a way that we now 
know is a natural way by which thoughts can be com- 
municated directly from one mind to another, com- 
municating thoughts to certain individuals of their 
number who in turn passed them on to all the rest. 
In other words by this order of prophets and institu- 
tion of prophecy, for there seems to have been a suc- 
cession of these prophets almost all through their 
history. 

In this way on God's part the conversation begun on 
Sinai was continued, and all down their history the 
friendly fellowship of conversation was kept up. In 
its right setting we see thus that prophecy was not only 
a justifiable thing, but it was a natural and necessary 
thing if human fellowship with God is a reality, and 
if God in the Biblical movement was exhibiting a great 
movement of fellowship carried on in the way that 
human fellowship is ordinarily carried on. 

Continuous Oedee of Peophets 
We commonly think of the prophets as the six- 
teen men who wrote the prophetic books of the 
Bible with a few others, such as Elijah, Elisha, Nathan 
and Samuel. This is as great a mistake as it would 
be to think of Christian preachers as consisting of 



PEOPHBOY 233 

only a few great men, such as Fenelon, Spurgeon, 
Moody and the like, whose published sermons have be- 
come classics. 

The prophets were an order of religious men some- 
what analogous to the clergy of our time. They 
flourished at least for many centuries. References to 
them in the Bible are frequent either by the term 
Prophets or " Sons of the Prophets." They certainly 
were in existence in Samuel's time (1 Sam. 19 : 20). 
The passage in Deuteronomy 18:15-18 along with 
others may be interpreted to mean that the order of 
prophets was instituted and continued right from the 
time of the founding of the nation, and they were in a 
sense the successors of Moses himself. We must notice 
also that it is expressly indicated in that passage that 
the meaning of these prophets was the same as the 
meaning of the voice from Sinai. That voice from 
Sinai was too awesome to be the regular method of 
communication. The people plead for something 
simpler and this order of prophets was given in its 
stead (Ex. 20 : 19 ; Deut. 5 : 23 ff.). 

When considering the Old Testament miracles the 
question naturally suggested itself, if the meaning of 
this supernatural regime was fellowship granted by 
God to men why was it not more continuous and 
frequent ? Three or four groups of a dozen or so of 
these miracles or fellowship acts, coming at intervals 
of two or three hundred years apart, would not seem 
to indicate a very close relation of fellowship on God's 
part (cf. page 210). 

If we are to consider that the whole Israelite move- 



234 THE SUPEKNATUKAL 

merit was a movement to impress God's sympathetic 
friendliness, some species of continuous personal inter- 
course and fellowship by God with them would seem 
to be called for. Just that is furnished by this order 
of prophets, and furnished in the most appropriate and 
helpful way. 

As expressed in the passage in Deuteronomy, the 
visible appearance and audible voice of God on Sinai 
was too awful and overpowering and neutralized the 
desired effect of social friendliness. But by this 
method the voice came from a man " of their breth- 
ren "just like themselves, though the communications 
were from God. This man received the communica- 
tions from God in a quiet, unobtrusive way, a way 
which we now find to be quite in line with natural 
processes, and which at that time was considered ap- 
propriate for a communication from God. 

All down through the history of Israel we find this 
succession of prophets, — of men who were the medium 
through which God spoke to the people and kept up 
His fellowship of conversation with them. That they 
were quite numerous seems to be indicated by the fact 
that even in the dark times of apostasy under Ahab 
the one hundred of them that Obadiah saved (1 Kings 
18 : 13) was only a remnant from the great number 
that Jezebel killed. A little later Elijah visits com- 
munities of them in Bethel and Jericho (2 Kings 2 : 
3-5), and the company in Jericho was so large that 
fifty men from them went to seek for the body of the 
translated Elijah. Even in Samuel's time they were 
so numerous and well known that when Saul acted in 



PKOPHECY 235 

a peculiar manner the people immediately concluded 
that he had become one of them (1 Sam. 19 : 20-24). 

Divine Eevelation of Teaching 
But was the office of these prophets, as we have 
claimed, to afford social touch and fellowship from 
God to men? Was not their office really that of 
teachers, to reveal useful knowledge and instruction 
from God to men, and thus an unnecessary irruption 
into the evolution process ? 

As has been already noted, social conversation, even 
if its main purpose is entirely social friendliness and 
fellowship, must be about something. If from a good 
and wise man it will likely be something useful. Cer- 
tainly conversations or communications from God will 
have as subject matter something profitable even though 
the purpose that inspired it is entirely the wish to show 
social friendliness. Indeed the helpfulness of the con- 
versation will just so much more make it an appropriate 
act of friendly fellowship. 

That it cannot reasonably be considered essentially 
an enterprise of teaching is proved by the fact that at 
least as regards merely ethical matters of man's con- 
duct to man there is very little if any new teaching 
given. The things denounced by the prophets as sin 
are such things as murder, adultery, drunkenness, theft, 
oppression, cruelty, falsehood and the like. All of these 
had been recognized as evils by all the nations for ages. 
The prophets merely warn and denounce the people for 
engaging in these known sins. In all their denuncia- 
tions of sin they refer to the evils denounced as al- 



236 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

ready known to be sin, rarely if ever setting forth 
any new ethical principle or precept which they com- 
mand to be obeyed. 

What is new, or at least fresh, is their vivid repre- 
sentation of God's attitude towards all these things, 
and their bringing to bear all the weight of God's per- 
sonality against them. This is the thing that is relied 
on to produce the reforming, elevating effect upon the 
people, and this is something that lies distinctly within 
the sphere of fellowship. 

Peesonal Atmospheee 

Almost wherever we take up the prophecies for ex- 
amination we are impressed with the fact that the 
dominant note is not revelation of doctrine but per- 
sonal appeal. There is much reference to ethical and 
theological truth indeed, to sins against men and sins 
against God, but it is always referred to not as revela- 
tion of new principles and new laws, but as reference 
to things they knew to be wrong and the mere mention 
of which ought to touch them with shame. The whole 
force of the appeal depends on the fact that they will 
spontaneously recognize these things as wrong, and 
that they knew or ought to have known that they 
were doing wrong when they did them. 

But the one most significant thing is the intensely 
personal tone that dominates it all. It is the impas- 
sioned pleading of a friend with a wayward friend. It 
is the protest of slighted friendship. It is the appeal 
of a lover for a love that he has a right to expect and 
that his heart yearns for. He has lavished his friend- 



PKOPHECY 237 

ship, favour and care, and Israel does not reciprocate 
with answering love and loyalty but chooses the fellow- 
ship of other friends and lovers. 

Such in substance is the note that is sounded again 
and again by almost every one of the prophets, and 
which may be counted the characteristic theme of the 
whole movement. And a most remarkable feature is 
the way that frequently the most severe arraignment 
of disloyalty and ingratitude will end up with a dec- 
laration of entire forgiveness and restoration of favour, 
and this too apparently without anything in the cir- 
cumstances to warrant or call for it (cf. Ezek. 16 : 63 if. ; 
Hos. 2:14ff., etc.). 

It is all indeed a revelation in the truest sense. Not 
a revelation of doctrines and ethical principles, but a 
revelation of the heart of God. It is just such a revela- 
tion as ought to have the greatest drawing power to 
bring them into trusting fellowship with Him. And 
manifestly that is the one great purpose for which it is 
given. 

It is a great picture of God. And if we will broaden 
our minds to look on the picture as a whole without 
distracting attention to criticism of the details we must 
see that it is the same picture that is presented by the 
four Gospels of the New Testament. It is a great 
friend pained by the sins and ruin of His loved friends, 
pleading with them to reform and return to Him, and 
ever breathing the promise of forgiveness and restored 
favour and peace. Nor is the feature of suffering 
atonement entirely lacking, for in many passages we 
can see in God's deep grief and pain over the sins of 



238 THE STJPEBHATUKAL 

His people a suggestive parallel of Gethsemane if not 
even of Calvary itself. 

Seveee Peophecies 

When we consider the text of many of the proph- 
ecies, however, a rather severe difficulty seems to arise. 
"We have claimed that all the supernatural was a per- 
sonal friendly fellowship movement by God to win 
men into a state of trusting fellowship with Him. But 
a large part of the prophecies consists of denunciations 
and threats of punishment. How can this be made to 
agree with the conception that these prophecies and all 
the supernatural are acts of friendship, have their mo- 
tive in a relation of personal friendship and are in- 
tended to win men to friendship and trust ? Are they 
not rather the acts of a moral governor, a supernatural 
interposition for the sake of, if not punishment, at least 
discipline and government ? 

In answer to this we must first remind ourselves that 
friendship is not always a matter of smooth words and 
flattery. That only is true friendship which can use 
severe words and painful messages when they are 
necessary and helpful. True friendship must adhere 
to the truth. He would be the truest friend to Israel 
who would tell them plainly of the sins that prevailed 
among the people and the punishments those sins would 
surely bring. 

It is true indeed that it is the same person who is 
speaking in prophecy who is the one that will inflict 
the punishment. But even that need give us no diffi- 
culty, for we must remember that while that is true 



PEOPHECY 239 

yet the inflicting the punishment is an entirely sepa- 
rate act from the act of giving warning about it, and 
that is all that the supernatural prophecy is. That 
punishment when He does inflict it will not be part of 
His supernatural activity. It will all be a part of nat- 
ural law as we have seen. It will be the work of God 
as moral governor, and God does not need to resign 
His place as moral governor in order that He may 
offer to act as a friend. The only supernatural part in 
the transaction is the warning and appeal, and that is 
not the work of a judge or governor but of a personal 
friend. 

"We must remember that Jesus is declared to be the 
one who will judge the world and condemn the wicked, 
yet no one questions that His attitude towards all men 
is always that of a friend, and He wept over Jerusa- 
lem to think of the punishment that was coming on the 
people for their sins. It is the same heart that appears 
in all the warnings of the prophecies. All through 
even the severest denunciations there is evident an un- 
dertone of sorrow and pain, as though God Himself 
were suffering over His people both for their sins and 
for the punishments those sins would bring upon them. 

Not all of prophecy, however, is of this severe char- 
acter by any means. A large part of the prophecies 
consist of comfort, assurances of triumph and bright 
pictures of the future for God's people. Moreover the 
extant texts of the prophecies must constitute an ex- 
ceedingly small proportion of the vast amount of 
prophetic utterance by the large body of prophets all 
through so many centuries. Those on record are largely 



240 THE SUPEENATUKAL 

prophecies called out by some pressing crisis in the his- 
tory, and so more likely to be of this severe, denuncia- 
tory nature than the great mass of prophecies given in 
more normal, peaceful times. 

We may safely claim, then, that prophecy as well as 
miracles is all to be included in that one great regime 
of friendly fellowship by God. It is all appropriate to 
this which we have considered the main purpose of the 
Bible. It is all a service of friendship and fellowship. 
The tone of it all is a continuous appeal by God to the 
people for loyalty and trust. It is a very necessary 
part of that regime as it furnishes just that which such 
a special relation of fellowship as God proposed posi- 
tively demanded and without which it could hardly 
be said to exist, namely, a continuous intercourse of 
friendly conversation by God with the people. 



YII 

NATIONAL HISTORY 

THE third division of the supernatural in our 
classification comprises the historical parts 
and all the remainder of the Old Testament. 
It has been usual to consider this to be supernatural in 
the sense that all the writers were inspired or specially 
helped and guided by God in its composition. We may 
perhaps go beyond this and find a supernatural quality 
in the very substance of the history itself. 

We have defined the supernatural to be activity of 
God personally directed to definite individuals, in dis- 
tinction from His general activity in nature, which is 
directed to the whole universe impartially. In this his- 
tory much of the activity of God is represented to be 
of this class, personally and intentionally directed to 
certain specific individuals or to a particular nation. 
Indeed it is all a story of special treatment by God of 
the nation of Israel or of individuals in it. That is the 
very essence of the plot of the whole narrative. 

In addition to this we find that all the events are 
represented as observed from God's view-point. The 
events themselves may have been all just ordinary 
events such as occurred in all the other nations and are 
occurring to men and nations now, but while in ordi- 
nary history we see only the human side and human 

241 



242 THE SUPERNATURAL 

elements, what men did, suffered or desired, in this. case 
we see more, for we see God having an active part in 
these same events. We see God behind and above, 
directing and using them all. Especially we see His 
plan and intention with regard to them. This possibly 
would not make it supernatural within the definition 
that we are using here, but it is a feature that has a 
similar value in that it gives us a close and familiar 
view of God, and thus contributes to the feeling of per- 
sonal acquaintance and fellowship with Him. 

It is these features of the Book that are the most 
important. Indeed in as far as the Bible is to be con- 
sidered a book of religious teaching it is these elements 
that give it its value. It has been another way of view- 
ing and estimating the Book which has led to all the 
trouble and embarrassment. On the one hand, men 
have considered the Bible heroes as intended to be re- 
ligious models and standards, — with very embarrassing 
results. On the other hand many have considered the 
whole to be but the history of a people of specially 
keen religious instincts gradually struggling upward 
into the light, practically precluding any supernatural 
elements in it at all, and of course abrogating any re- 
ligious authority or normative value. 

Bible Chaeactees All Noemal Men 
In making our study of the Old Testament history 
then we will practically disregard any special moral ex- 
cellence of any of the characters. We will not con- 
sider the people of Israel on any different plane mor- 
ally from any of the other nations of the time. We 



NATIONAL HISTOEY 243 

shall not attach any significance specially even to any 
higher theological conceptions they may have attained. 
The people portrayed, or some of them, may have been 
distinctly superior in many respects to the average men 
of the age, and their theological outlook may have come 
to be very much purer and higher, but that is not the 
lesson of the Book. 

The real lesson intended to be conveyed is to portray 
how God acts and has acted. The men and their char- 
acters and beliefs are merely the material which He 
uses in showing His activity and His character. The 
history is a biography of God. The picture is a picture 
of God. It is because a person can only show social 
characteristics by having other social beings with whom 
he interacts that all these human persons are introduced 
as the groundwork of this picture of God. 

That the picture may be of the greatest value the 
persons to whom God affords the friendly social touch 
should be of all classes and all moral grades, the best 
of them with many faults and all of them together just 
fairly averaging up to the general standards of their 
age, as we average up to the standards of our age. 

This then is the nature of the history which we shall 
take up for study. It is a book of the biography of 
God, intended to portray to us how He acts towards 
all classes and conditions of men and what is His atti- 
tude towards them, and also what is the attitude He 
permits and invites from them towards Himself. 

In making this study it will not be amiss to remem- 
ber that it is the same God who " taught 'the lion to 
hunt his prey," and made the great sea monsters to 



244 THE SUPEKNATTJKAL 

tear and devour one another. It is an infinite being 
whom we are studying who does His work with refer- 
ence to the whole universe and all time. It will clarify 
our vision much to thus view Him from the standpoint 
of the evolutionist and view the parts in the perspective 
of the whole. "We must abandon the idea that " God 
only loves good little boys." He uses and is in inti- 
mate contact with all both bad and good. Moreover 
He strictly adheres to His original creative purpose to 
leave all things to develop naturally and live their lives 
on the level to which they have attained, and He uses 
them all just on that level. This is an important prin- 
ciple whose neglect has led to many of the difficulties 
in reconciling acts attributed to God. 

There is a style of interpretation of the Bible in 
which God's activities are supposed to be like a stream 
of pure water flowing through the turbid, corrupt 
stream of man's history, and the people that God uses 
for any important enterprise are for that reason as- 
sumed to be necessarily superior if not faultless men. 
This is not at all the theory of interpretation which we 
are following here. 

Lessons feom God's Dealings with Nations 
We may take up first the history as it refers to 
nations and second as it refers to individuals. We will 
bear in mind that what is important is not the fortunes 
of these nations or their reactions with each other but 
only God's attitude towards them and His treatment 
of them. From this view-point what is the lesson 
which the Book brings ? 



NATIONAL HISTOEY 245 

Our first thought perhaps would be that the lesson 
will be God's beneficent rule over the nations, and His 
efforts to lead them up to higher and purer national 
life. The natural tendencies of men and nations are 
towards things that are evil and corrupt. Eulers are 
ambitious and selfish and society left to itself soon 
becomes cruel and bad. God constantly sits above the 
movements and councils of nations, correcting and lead- 
ing them into the ways that make for right and prog- 
ress. The Bible in showing us God's activity and in- 
fluence behind human events will show us that though 
unknown to us God is constantly restraining the natural 
tendencies of men and nations and infusing higher, 
purer elements into the corrupt stream of human 
activity. 

A little examination, however, will show that this 
opinion is not quite correct. While the Bible assumes 
that God does have perfect power over all the nations 
and all their activities, and while we know that in His 
great world plan which we call Nature He is providing 
the most efficient apparatus for the restraining of evil 
and steady advance of progress, yet the history in the 
Bible does not for the most part represent Him as ever 
interfering by any supernatural or special control for 
that purpose. For a special reason which we have 
considered already He does do many acts of helpful- 
ness and guidance to one nation, Israel, but that was 
not done primarily for the improvement of the world 
for improvement's sake but was wholly an exercise of 
friendly fellowship by God because it was His plan to 
engage in such fellowship for an independent reason. 



246 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

As regards all the other nations of the world it repre- 
sents Him as leaving them entirely to follow their own 
inclinations and desires unhindered, — subject of course 
to the judgments and retributions which natural law 
visits on all wrong-doing. 

Even in the case of this one nation, Israel, it is not 
an effective, coercing control but chiefly counsel, en- 
couragements, warnings and moral suasion. It is the 
care of a wise friend rather than the manipulation of 
the creator God. As a matter of fact the nation did 
develop in most respects according to its own natural 
tendencies and was not noticeably different from the 
other nations of the time and region, as we know from 
other contemporary history, and also from a careful 
reading of the Bible history itself. 

The Bible teaching as to the nations in general seems 
to be that He leaves them to develop freely according 
to their natural tendencies. He leaves the evolution 
process untrammelled to work out the destiny of nations 
as well as individuals. That evolution system is His 
work, and it is admirably efficient in securing the good 
results He wishes. Having established at creation such 
a great efficient system He does not interfere with it to 
do by other means the work it was designed to do. 

Such is the picture the Bible gives us of God in His 
attitude towards all the nations of the world. Nations 
as well as individuals are free to follow the path of 
their own desires, though God's natural laws are just 
as free and are certain to visit on them the results of 
their acts. Nature and evolution, since they are God's 
Work, do have very efficient facilities for lessening evil 



NATIONAL HISTOET 247 

and bettering national conditions, but this does not 
come by arbitrary outside control and special super- 
natural interference from God. The Bible gives us no 
slothful assurance that some divinity will shape up the 
ends which we rough hew, either as nations or as 
individuals. 

Lessons feom God's Dealings with Iseael 

But this is not the message the Bible was given to 
convey to us. It is a true and valid negative inference, 
but the real lesson which the national history contained 
in the Bible was intended to convey to us is something 
positive, and it is all bound up in the history of God's 
dealings with this one nation, Israel, as indeed that 
constitutes the real body of the history, and the refer- 
ences to other nations are merely auxiliary and inci- 
dental. 

The lesson we are expected to learn from God's 
treatment of the nation of Israel is not a political 
lesson, it is not a lesson in government nor even in 
national morality. It is not primarily a lesson to 
nations at all in their national capacity. It is a re- 
ligious lesson, as all the other lessons of the Book are, 
and it is a lesson directed to us as individuals, just 
as all the other lessons of religion are. For religion, 
as we now know, is not a matter of masses and of 
organization, but primarily a private matter between 
the soul of each individual and God. 

The reason why the action is with a nation rather than 
with an individual is in order to magnify it and write it 
large so it will be conspicuous and impressive. But 



248 THE SUPERNATURAL 

the intention is to influence private individual hearts 
by the picture of God thus portrayed. And we may 
note also that that is the way it has always been used 
by the Church. The experiences of "God's chosen 
people" and God's attitude towards them have con- 
stantly been used by our fathers as in some form or 
other typical of private Christian life now. 

What then is the history portrayed ? Briefly stated 
the Bible represents that God chose the nation of Israel 
to give to them special treatment and favour. He 
rescued them from slavery, built them up into a nation, 
gave them laws, and gave them His own care as over- 
lord and ruler. He assisted them to conquer a land to 
dwell in, and enabled them to maintain their integrity 
there as a nation for many hundred years. 

During all this time He continued in intimate social 
contact with them, giving them advice and warning, 
occasionally allowing them to fall natural victims to 
the aggressiveness of powerful neighbours when they 
broke the bond of fellowship by apostasy, but deliver- 
ing them by special means when they came back again 
into the fellowship of loyalty and trust. This very 
briefly is the essence of the history. What is its mean- 
ing and its value practically to us ? 

In the first place, the primary teaching of it all is 
not some great political lesson for the nations and 
their rulers, but a personal, private and purely religious 
teaching to us as individuals. The meaning of it all is 
to so exhibit God in an attitude of intimate personal 
kindness as to thereby invite and draw us and all men 
into a relation of trust, loyalty and confiding fellowship 



NATIONAL HISTOEY 249 

with Him. That is the lesson which it is all designed 
to convey to us. 

The essence of the whole movement is not moral 
government but partiality and personal help. It is 
not a lesson in government, not even in ethical training, 
but personal friendship. According to the Bible repre- 
sentation God chose this nation for this special treat- 
ment, not for any special moral worthiness in them 
either present or prospective. It was entirely a matter 
of personal friendship between Him and their great 
ancestor Abraham that led to His promising such 
special treatment in the first place. All through the 
history He carried out that promise distinctly in the 
character of a friend showing favouritism and not as 
the impartial moral ruler of the world treating all 
nations alike. 

The conditions which determined the continuance of 
that special helpful relation towards them were not 
primarily ethical but personal. It was a personal 
loyalty towards God as a person which was the one 
condition continually insisted upon. It was always 
breaking that bond of fellowship by apostasy that was 
the cause of the withdrawal of God's protection with 
the consequent disasters that came upon them. 

Peculiar Attitude Towaeds Idolatry 
It is a significant fact that the one fault most often 
and most heavily charged against them was precisely 
this fault of breaking the bond of fellowship by apos- 
tasy in following other gods. Again and again there 
are accounts of their being allowed to fall under op- 



250 THE SUPEBNATUKAL 

pression on account of their sins, but the sin specified is 
not ethical wrong, cruelty and crime but worshipping 
idols and thus offending against the bond of loyalty 
that should unite them to God. 

There was plenty of crime and evil in the land, and 
in the prophets we do find frequent charges and warn- 
ings on account of it. But that is a different matter. 
The prophecies, as we have seen, have the nature of 
conversations by God with them in which He would 
speak to them of anything that was profitable to them, 
including their relations to Him as moral governor of 
the world. But in the movement of the history, in as 
far as it gives the account of God's special dealings to 
show His personal attitude towards men, whenever a 
punishment is recorded as coming upon them it is 
always for a breach of this social fellowship bond, 
never for ethical wickedness. And the reason was be- 
cause that was the one essential object of all this move- 
ment. Their moral conduct was a matter for God in 
His character as moral governor, that is in the evolu- 
tion process, and the whole matter is in the same cate- 
gory as creation and natural law. But here in His 
attitude of friend, which is the whole theme of the 
Bible history, the one thing which was an offense to be 
resented was disloyalty to that friendship, and that is 
the one thing for which punishment is portrayed as 
coming in the historical movement. 

On the other hand it is a very curious and remark- 
able fact, and one that has seemed hard to account for, 
that while idolatry among the people of Israel was so 
constantly denounced and severely punished yet the 



NATIONAL HISTOEY 251 

other nations which practiced it exclusively were 
neither denounced nor punished on account of it. 
There are occasional representations in the prophets of 
punishments denounced against these other nations, but 
it is either for moral sins and crime or else, more often, 
for the mere fact of hostility and unkindness to Israel. 

While the worshipping of idols in these other nations 
is sometimes held up to ridicule as a lesson (cf. Isa. 
44 : 9-11), it is never made the subject of severe 
denunciations as it so constantly is in Israel. Indeed 
the earlier literature seems in some cases almost to 
treat that worship of other gods as quite normal and 
legitimate in other nations (cf. Judg. 11 : 24). Some 
have even claimed that the early Bible teaching is not 
really monotheistic but represents Jehovah merely as 
the national divinity of the Israelites, recognizing the 
existence of the other gods of the other nations. 

But all this will become quite reasonable when we 
fully recognize what was the object of these denuncia- 
tions and of all the Bible discipline. It was not 
primarily to teach impressively to the world the unity 
of God and the badness of idolatry. It was not 
primarily to teach anything to the world. It was all 
an immediate practical matter with a distinct concrete 
purpose, namely, to win this one specific people into a 
relation of loyal friendship and personal attachment to 
God. 

JSTot teaching truths but cementing a concrete bond 
of fellowship between them and Him was the thing 
desired, and idolatry was precisely the formal breaking 
of that bond on their part. That is why idolatry in 



252 



THE STJPEKNATURAL 



them was so severely treated. The one offense that 
friendship cannot condone is to repudiate the bond of 
friendship itself. That is just what idolatry among 
the people of Israel did. 

Among other nations it had no such implication. In 
the other nations their idolatry was simply looking up 
with what little darkened knowledge they had, and 
trying to offer some homage to some superior being 
that they felt was over them. God Himself was in 
fact the one and only superior being that was over 
them, and He need not necessarily resent the ignorance 
and mistakes of their honest but misguided efforts 
(cf. Acts 17 : 29, 30). But idolatry in Israel was quite 
a different thing just because there was clear knowl- 
edge and because there was that special personal bond 
of fellowship between them and Jehovah, a bond which 
all God's dealings with them were given for the pur- 
pose of strengthening, and which idolatry served to 
entirely break and repudiate. 



Israel's Friend Kather Than the Moeal 

KlJLER OF THE WORLD 

In this history we must keep clearly in mind the dis- 
tinction between God as moral ruler of the world and 
God as over-lord and " Shepherd of Israel." The two 
relations are quite distinct and essentially different. 
As moral ruler of the world God must be perfectly 
impartial, treating all nations with equal favour. But 
here He is represented as extremely partial, as always 
treating the Israelites with special favour and giving 
them advantages and benefits that He did not give to 



NATIONAL HISTOEY 253 

any other nation, even giving them at the expense of 
the other nations. He is represented as the special 
patron of Israel, championing their interests when they 
conflicted with the interests of other nations even 
though the moral rights of both were equal. He fully 
identified Himself with them as against all other 
nations. All He required in return was what friend- 
ship always demands, namely, that they should re- 
ciprocate and maintain a similar loyalty to Him. 

As pointed out elsewhere, there was no moral reason 
why the Egyptians should not have continued to hold 
possession of their serfs, just as any other nation, and 
the Israelites themselves later, were allowed to do. It 
was merely that God said, " They are my people and I 
will deliver them." It was quite in accordance with 
the ethics and international law of the era for a nation 
to migrate, seize a land to dwell in and drive out the 
former inhabitants, provided only they were able. 
God, because He wished to favour this people of Israel 
as His own people, made them able and helped them to 
conquer the land. In the ordinary history of national 
life it would have been quite impossible that they in 
that most critical location, the continual battle-ground 
between Egypt and Assyria, should have long continued 
without being blotted out as a nation or merged with 
some other peoples in new and still new national units. 
But God, because He had identified Himself with them 
and chose to do so, kept them intact a separate and 
unmixed nation for a thousand years. God plainly did 
not act in any of these instances as moral ruler of the 
world at all, but as the friendly champion of this one 



254 THE SUPEKNATUKAL 

small nation, identifying Himself with all their inter- 
ests, even in antagonism to the interests of other equally 
worthy nations. 

Not that He at all abrogated His office of moral 
governor, or that He minimized the value of moral 
laws and virtue. On the contrary He exalted them, 
and in His capacity as over-lord and counsellor did very 
much to establish respect for law and lead the people 
up to better lives. But the national movements and 
the favours bestowed were not based on these consider- 
ations but on the one fact that God had identified 
Himself with the interests of this nation and meant to 
see that they were safe and successful as long as they 
reciprocated the friendship. 

The lesson to us of the national history then is not a 
lesson directed primarily to our national life, either to 
its politics or ethics, or even to its relations to God. It 
is rather a private lesson to us personally as individuals. 
Its lesson is precisely the same as the lesson of God's 
dealings with individuals, only magnified to make it 
more conspicuous. It is just the same as the one lesson 
of all the Bible, and entirely a religious lesson. It is 
simply a great picture of God identifying Himself with 
specific men in sympathetic friendship and fellowship. 
It is simply a great movement to inspire in us a recip- 
rocal feeling of trust, friendship and fellowship with 
God. 



ym 

GOD AND INDIVIDUALS 

WHEN we pass to the history as it deals with 
individuals we are coming to something 
that seems to touch us more closely. "We 
can see more easily how it has bearing on our own lives. 
We can see there more evidently what attitude God 
may be expected to have towards us as individuals, and 
how we may feel towards Him. 

As we take up this topic perhaps our first thought 
would be that the message is a message, if not of fear, 
at least of sternness and awe. The Old Testament 
represents God as a holy being with an intense hatred 
of sin. The movement is full of punishments of sin. 
The object is to arouse in us an appropriate fear of 
God's judgments and a zeal to live righteously before 
Him. It is a common estimate that the New Testa- 
ment teaches God's love but the Old Testament was 
intended to teach His justice, righteousness and pun- 
ishment of sin. 

If by sin we mean crime and wrong between man 
and man that estimate is not entirely correct. How 
many instances are there in the Old Testament where 
a man received supernatural punishment from God on 
account of moral sins? Punishments there were in- 
deed, but as in the case of the nation, the cause of the 
punishment was almost always something that im- 

255 



256 THE SUPEKNATUBAL 

pinged upon the personal relation of loyalty towards 
God. In other words it was offense against the bond 
of friendship itself that caused the punishments. More- 
over in the great majority of cases there was no super- 
natural infliction of punishment at all, but merely 
when the person broke the bond of friendship God 
withdrew the protection of that friendship and allowed 
him to fall under some natural evil impending over 
him. 

There are some cases that at first seem to be an ex- 
ception to this. Eli's sons were morally wicked, and 
on that account God predicted their violent death 
(1 Sam. 2 : 27-36). But even in doing so He was at 
pains to declare that it was not merely the immorality 
as such that brought the punishment, but because as 
priests they brought contempt upon the service of God 
and thus offended against the personal relation of God 
to the people. 

Again in the case of Ahab, after he had murdered 
Naboth and seized his vineyard the prophet Elijah 
comes to him and denounces his violent death and the 
destruction of his house (1 Kings 21 : 17-29). But 
from the words of the denunciation, as well as from 
the fact that substantially the same denunciation had 
been made before, it is evident that the murder was 
rather the occasion than the real cause of the denuncia- 
tion. And when he acknowledged God and repented 
God lightened the punishment. Doubtless his repent- 
ance was chiefly terror at the threatened punishment. 
Yet it was a real acknowledgment of God and was so 
accepted. 



GOD AND INDIVIDUALS 257 

But more than that, in both cases the punishment 
was not a supernatural punishment of God but was 
merely a natural calamity that came upon them. All 
that it is represented that God did supernaturally was 
to warn them of it by a prophet and point out that it 
was really a punishment for their sins. 

God does denounce immorality and crime all through 
the Bible, and warn men of the punishment that will 
come on them for it. But that is quite a different 
thing from punishing a man supernaturally. Such 
warning is really a kindness. Punishment of moral 
wrong is a part of natural law. It is merely a fact, 
and it is kindness to warn us of a fact. It is merely a 
fact that gravitation draws, fire burns and poison kills. 
That penalty follows the infraction of law either phys- 
ical, psychical or moral is merely a fact. It is an 
arrangement that the Creator established from the 
beginning as part of the great evolution system. It is 
kindness in God to remind us of that fact, and even to 
use most urgent means to impress it upon us, as He 
does so often in the Bible. 

In His great enterprise of fellowship God in talking 
to men must talk about something important. He 
might have talked to us about the composition of the 
stars, or taught us how to manufacture radium and 
construct aeroplanes. But in doing so He would have 
deprived us of the great pleasure and discipline of dis- 
covering those things ourselves. Instead His talk is 
chiefly on the plane of moral principles which we al- 
ready know, though He adds the whole weight of His 
personality and of the bond of friendship between us 



258 THE SUPEKNATURAL 

to try to get us to feel their truth and benefit by it, — 
certainly a most appropriate form of conversation be- 
tween a kind creator and His developing and independ- 
ent-minded children. 

Natuee of the Supeenatueal Punishments 
In almost all the cases where God inflicted what 
might be called a supernatural punishment the offense 
was something personal to Himself, such as breaking 
some administrative or ceremonial rule. Nadab and 
Abihu were killed for breaking the ceremonial rules 
(Lev. 10 : 1-2). Korah and his companions were killed 
for defying the administrative rules (Num. 16 : 25-35). 
We may include the man killed for violating the newly 
promulgated Sabbath rule (Num. 15 : 32-36), for the 
punishment was specifically ordered by God. Uzzah 
was killed for breaking a ceremonial rule (1 Chron. 13 : 
9, 10). Jeroboam's hand was withered for a presumptu- 
ous wrong act of worship (1 Kings 13 : 1-6). The fifty 
soldiers were killed for despising God's representative 
(2 Kings 1 : 9-12). Uzziah was stricken with leprosy 
for infringing the ceremonial regulations (2 Chron. 26 : 
16-19). Even the leprosy inflicted upon Gehazi 
(2 Kings 5 : 27) was evidently not merely because he 
told a lie but because he thereby tended to tarnish the 
sacred office of his master as prophet of God. 

Unquestionably there must have been frequent cases 
of exaggerated crimes, of violence, cruelty and injustice 
all through the history that might have been held up 
as examples by supernatural punishment, if God had 
wished to do so. The fact that He does not do so, and 



GOB AND INDIVIDUALS 259 

that there is all this long list of cases where He inflicted 
supernatural calamity for offenses personal to Himself 
must have some significance. 

If God's object in all the movement recorded in the 
Bible was by giving friendship to men to draw them 
into a relation of friendship to Himself, then this mean- 
ing is quite apparent. It is quite natural for friendship 
to resent specially any affront to the person or anything 
that despises and breaks the bond of friendship. It 
may patiently tolerate all other kinds of evil, but that 
is fatal. 

We may notice also that when He does inflict these 
supernatural calamities for breach of fellowship it is 
always done in a way and in a setting such as to make 
it as conspicuous as possible, quite in contrast with the 
miracles of help and mercy, which are often most quiet 
and inconspicuous. The meal was multiplied and the 
son raised in the obscure home of a widow in Sarepta 
(1 Kings IT : 14-25). The oil was multiplied for a 
prophet's widow (2 Kings 4 : 1-7). There was a resur- 
rection at the prophet's grave (2 Kings 13 : 21). The 
chariots of fire were seen only by Elisha (2 Kings 2 : 11). 
Help was given under the juniper tree in the desert 
(1 Kings 19 : 5-8). These and other acts of like kind 
were all done in private, and intended to impress God's 
sympathy with the humblest and accessibility to the 
private individual. 

But Uzzah is struck down in the great royal pro- 
cession (1 Chron. 13 : 9-10). Jeroboam's hand is with- 
ered at a great national ceremony (1 Kings 13 : 1-6). 
King Uzziah is stricken with leprosy in the temple at 



260 THE SUPEBNATUKAL 

a great religious ceremony (2 Chron. 26 : 16-19). Both 
Korah and his companions and the priests Nadab and 
Abihu were smitten under circumstances of the greatest 
possible publicity (Lev. 10 and Num. 16). It all looks 
as though God were trying to accomplish the greatest 
amount of salutary warning with the smallest possible 
expense of suffering. 

But not all of God's special dealings with individuals, 
by any means, were of this severe character. By far 
the greater number of incidents represent Him in an 
attitude of kindness and favour. Even in cases where 
punishment seemed urgently called for He is more often 
portrayed as patient and lenient and seeking to delay 
or remit the punishments entirely. Moreover if God 
regarded the personal bond of covenanted fellowship 
between us and Himself as so precious that the only 
punishments He did personally inflict either on indi- 
viduals or on the nation were for acts that despised or 
broke that bond, that should be to us a ground rather 
of hope than of fear, for jealousy is considered to be a 
sign of especial love. 

Men of Low Social Level 
When we turn then to the other side to study the 
acts of favour and kindness we find them bestowed 
upon all classes and grades of people. 

One of the significant features of the Old Testament 
is the way it represents God in familiar comradeship 
with all sorts and conditions of men, and as using them, 
even some of the most unlikely of them, in some of His 
most important enterprises. What we might call " The 



GOD AND INDIVIDUALS 261 

fellowship of service " is the highest kind of honour 
that He could offer to an active, earnest man, and it is 
remarkable on what low classes of people He bestowed 
that great honour. 

This is something that it is very hard to justify on 
the theory that God in the Bible is represented as 
moral ruler, rewarding men for their virtue or bringing 
into prominence those that are to be models for the 
world. But it is all clear and plain when we recognize 
that the Bible was not given to be a handbook of 
ethics but to picture God forth as the friend of men of 
all classes. In the Old Testament as well as in the 
New, He came " not to call the righteous but sinners " 
and to be the friend of those that need Him most. 

Take the character of Jephtha (Judg. 11 : 1-12 : 7), 
one of the judges that God used for a great work. He 
was an illegitimate son, and stung by the obloquy it 
brought upon him he went away off to the frontier re- 
gions and became a bandit, much such a character as 
" Jesse James " or " Francisco Yilla," perhaps. He 
was rough and harsh by nature, and even after he had 
risen to favour he killed his only daughter on account 
of a foolish, rash vow that he had thoughtlessly made. 

Is that the kind of man the Bible would have us be- 
lieve God approves ? Are we to take that as a char- 
acter we are encouraged to imitate ? It is hard to see 
how we can avoid some such implication if the Bible is 
intended chiefly as an ethical guide and to furnish us 
examples for imitation. There is not one word given 
in the record to express disapproval of any feature of 
his character or acts. He is used by God in a most 



262 THE SUPERNATURAL 

important service, and is raised thereby to a position of 
the highest honour in the state. 

Or take for another example Samson (Judg. 13-16), a 
great, hulking giant, sensual and dull of wit, whose 
forte was to jest and feast and slaughter men. And 
yet he stands in the lime-light of God's service, as 
prominent as any prophet or saint, his birth announced 
by an angel and his name engraved among the great 
deliverers of Israel. 

Are we to suppose that this teaches God's special ap- 
proval of that kind of character in men ? Is he to be 
taken as a model, and are we to think that by acting as 
he did we shall be specially pleasing to God ? What 
useful ethical or theological lesson can we learn from 
such a character and such a history ? 

It is hard to see how we can justify, not to say re- 
ceive profit from, the Bible accounts of such men in 
God's service on the view that the Bible is primarily 
intended to teach us ethics and depict God as the moral 
ruler of the world, or indeed on any other view than 
the one we have assumed here, that it is intended 
chiefly to teach us that God receives and fraternizes 
with any one of any character that is willing to frat- 
ernize with Him. It is the same attitude as that nota- 
ble statement of the New Testament : " This man re- 
ceiveth sinners and eateth with them " (Luke 15 : 2). 
He is meeting men as friend and not at all as judge or 
moral ruler. Yery imperfect men need friends just as 
much as perfect ones do, — if there be any such. And 
the contact of a good and noble friend will be as bene- 
ficial to them as it would be to the better man. 



GOD AND INDIVIDUALS 263 

It is just God's relation to such characters as these 
that teaches one of the most important lessons for us. 
It is a lesson the Church has largely forgotten, or has 
failed yet to lqarn. Perhaps it is our recent neglect of 
the Old Testament as a religious guide that is the cause 
why this lesson has not been taken to heart in this 
great sociological age. 

For there are large numbers of men of corresponding 
character among us to-day. They swear. They get 
drunk. They lead coarse, uncouth lives, — chiefly per- 
haps because they were born and brought up in that 
kind of an environment. Christians consider them out- 
side the pale of all church association. If Jesus were 
to come among us again, and we were to see Him 
spending days and nights in the company of such men 
and sending them upon important missions, we would be 
almost as much astonished and scandalized as the Jewish 
Pharisees were. These Old Testament stories show us 
that such men may be just as near to the compassion 
and the friendship of God as some of us whose charac- 
ters are of a slightly lighter shade of gray. 

With all their coarseness and low ethical standards 
they were at least responsive to God's advances and 
loyal. God can do something with that kind of a man. 
The more he needs it the more ready God is to give 
him friendship and use him in something good. These 
Old Testament stories do not teach us that such men 
are to be our ethical models, but they do teach us that 
they are our brothers, and that God does not shun them 
as we do. 

Salvation indeed will not mean as much to a man of 



264 THE SUPEKNATUBAL 

that low grade as it will to a man of a higher, finer 
nature. He will only get what his low, impoverished 
nature is able to receive from the fellowship of God, 
and a man of higher, finer nature will get immeasura- 
bly more out of that same fellowship. But he can have 
it just as well as the more highly developed man can, 
for God is just as willing to give it to him, or to any 
one who will receive it and respond to it. 

Haesh and Cruel Men 

Another class of men whose conduct conflicts with 
our modern standards somewhat is such men as Joshua, 
Jehu, Saul and the like. They were warriors, ruthless 
and cruel often. As their actions do not square with 
the Christian precept to "Love your enemies" and 
" Do good to all men," it is questioned how those ac- 
tions could have been actions directed and approved by 
God. 

As for Joshua we must remember that he was part 
of a great natural movement which God was using to 
work a favour to this nation Israel. At that time it was 
as normal for a tribe or nation that needed territory to 
seize it where they could and drive out the former 
holders, as it was for the Americans to take the western 
prairies away from the buffalo and deer. Whether it 
was ethically right or not is a question we need not 
raise at all, for God does not even now wait till all the 
plans and details of their enterprises are perfect and 
pure before He takes any part in the direction of men's 
affairs. He takes men as they are, — and He takes 
wolves as they are, — and He uses the normal acts of 



GOD AND INDIVIDUALS 265 

them both to work out wise purposes both in nature 
and in what we call Grace. 

Joshua being such a man as he was, and engaged in 
an enterprise in which according to the standards of 
international law of that day it was perfectly normal 
that he should be engaged, God stood by him as friend 
and helper, just as He stood by Cromwell, Washington, 
Dewey or Togo, in great cruel undertakings that yet 
wrought out great good results to men. 

Very much the same was true also in the case of Jehu 
(2 Kings 9-10). Many of his actions were cruel and 
treacherous. But they were all quite normal and in 
accord with the accepted standards of his day. Again 
it is not relevant to ask whether they were ethically 
right. He was such a man and did such things as were 
to be expected of a man in his age, and being so, God, 
when He was so inclined, saw nothing to hinder His 
standing by him as friend and using him. 

In both these cases, also in the cases of Jephtha and 
Samson, we must note that they were loyal and faith- 
ful to God. Whatever were their other offenses they 
did not offend against the bond of friendship and fellow- 
ship. In all this Bible movement that is the one funda- 
mental and essential matter. Not that morals and 
character are not extremely important, but simply that 
they are not the primary theme and object of the Bible 
any more than political economy is the primary theme 
of an algebra for instance. The one fundamental pur- 
pose of all the Bible movement is to win men into the 
state of loyal friendship and fellowship with God. 
That therefore is the one condition that must deter- 



266 THE SUPEKNATUKAL 

mine God's attitude towards any man and His use of 
him. 

And so we see in the case of Saul (1 Sam. 9 : 31) the 
same proposition illustrated from the reverse side. 
Saul was in many respects an estimable young man 
when God chose him. His faults were not especially 
on the side of aggression and cruelty. Indeed in one 
case his course was less cruel than the punitive pur- 
pose of God called for (1 Sam. 15). But his one fault 
was precisely offense against the loyalty which the fel- 
lowship bond towards his over-lord Jehovah called for. 
For that offense he was rejected, and God withdrew 
His friendship and alliance from him. He also de- 
clared that David whom He would put in his place was 
" A man after my heart who shall do all my will " 
(Acts 13 : 22 ; 1 Sam. 13 : 14). 

Thus from both sides we have illustration of the fact 
that the motive of the Bible history is not ethical but 
personal and social. It is the purpose of all the move- 
ment to try to get men to reciprocate the relation of 
pledged friendship which God offers. Those that do 
so are the ones that God uses and can use. It is offense 
against that relation that is the one cardinal fault that 
is fatal. That is the one lesson that is intended to be 
impressed by these stories of Joshua, Jehu, Saul, Ehud, 
Shamgar, Jephtha, Samson and others, whose char- 
acters and actions lack much of measuring up to the 
level of the ethical standards of our day. 

Along with this is the other lesson that no man is so 
rough and coarse as to be beyond the pale of God's 
sympathy and even of His companionship and use. 



GOD AND INDIVIDUALS 267 

He gives that sympathy and companionship most gladly 
to those that need it most. The God of the Old Testa- 
ment no less than the Christ of the New is really 
" The Sinner's Friend." 

God's Companionship with Good Men 
We will find this same principle of Bible interpreta- 
tion to be equally valid with reference to God's rela- 
tions with other men in the history whose lives were 
on a higher plane, and whose characters and conduct 
were nearer to our modern ideals. There is quite a 
long list of such men, of varying goodness and of vary- 
ing prominence in the history. Abraham, Joseph, 
Moses, Samuel, David, Solomon, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, 
Asa, Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, and a large number of 
greater and lesser men both in public and private life. 

It has been considered easier to make the records of 
these men profitable on the basis of ethical teaching 
and example. All of them had some admirable points 
worthy of imitation, and it is easy to pass over their 
faults with the mere remark that all men are fallible. 
Yet even the lives of such men as these become much 
more profitable to us when viewed merely as the back- 
ground of God's activities in friendliness and fellow- 
ship. Even with such men the vivid view of God's 
friendly social attitude towards them is far more use- 
ful to us than any benefit we can derive from the mere 
goodness to which they themselves attained. 

In saying this we are not discovering something new 
but merely expressing what the Christian consciousness 
has always felt in contact with these stories, but has 



268 THE SUPEEKATUEAL 

perhaps not always clearly formulated and asserted 
Abraham is called " The Father of the faithful " and 
his faith has considerable value in making up our the- 
ological propositions. But to us personally in our re- 
ligious lives there is far more comfort and inspiration, 
and far more practical benefit that comes from viewing 
the beautiful relation of familiar, personal friendship 
which is depicted as existing between God and him. 

The story of Joseph, the temptation he resisted and 
the unjust suffering he patiently endured (Gen. 39 ff.), 
may seem a moral lesson adapted to bring us great 
benefit. But as a matter of fact how much help or in- 
spiration do we feel for instance in reading " The Story 
of the Two Brothers," a singularly parallel experience 
related in ancient Egyptian legends, only without the 
hovering presence of God which infuses all this account 
and gives it its moving power. 

It is God choosing, training and using Moses in a 
great work which is the picture that chains our im- 
agination and influences us. It is God like a genial 
father calling the little boy Samuel to His side and 
talking to him (1 Sam. 3 : 1-14), and continuing the 
same familiar friendly attitude towards him all through 
his eventful life, which is the picture that influences 
us, rather than anything in the incidents and character 
of that long life. 

It is God and David, — God's delight in the humble, 
manly development of the young man, God protecting 
and leading him, God opening the way before him and 
giving him success and power, likewise God chastening 
him sorely when he fell into sin, and God receiving 



GOD AND INDIVIDUALS 269 

him back chastened and repentant into His favour 
again, God his ally, companion and confidential friend, 
inspiring to noble thoughts and deeds as well as com- 
forting in times of disaster and sorrow, — this is the 
picture that is engraved deep in our imaginations 
rather than merely David the boy hero, just king and 
mighty conqueror. 

With the prophets, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah and the 
rest, God bulks as the principal factor in the incidents 
recorded, and the prophets are merely His instruments 
and mouthpieces. "With the kings, such as Hezekiah, 
Josiah, Asa and the others, the narrative for the most 
part only aims to give their history in its relation to 
God, how God prospered them when they were faith- 
ful, and when they grew disloyal or slack in their 
allegiance allowed disaster to have its unhindered way 
upon them. Much the same is true also of all the 
other minor characters. Their history is given chiefly 
with reference to some act of mercy, kindness or guid- 
ance that God gave to them, and it is God's part in the 
case that is always the most important feature, together 
with their personal obedience and loyalty to God. 

The case of Solomon is an interesting one. In the 
beginning there was a very beautiful relation like that 
of father and filial son between God and the new king. 
God raised him to great power and gave him wonder- 
ful wisdom, and Solomon built the magnificent temple 
to his God. But in his later years this loyal fealty be- 
came clouded (2 Kings 11). Other deities were allowed 
to have some of the honour that should have been given 
to God alone. As the direct result of this, we are told, 



270 THE SUPEENATUBAL 

the latter days of the king were troubled and harassed, 
and after his death more than half the kingdom was 
swept away from his house entirely. 

We may note that the record makes the sole cause 
of these disasters to Solomon's house disloyalty and 
breaking the bond of fealty to Jehovah, though from 
the after complaints of the people to Eehoboam 
(1 Kings 12:4), there seems to have been a good deal 
of oppression of the people by him and other sins that 
might have been made the reason for the disaster if the 
book had been written with an ethical purpose. And 
yet the record cites only the defection from Jehovah 
as the cause of it all. 

In the case of the good kings Asa and Joash almost 
the same thing is recorded. Disasters came in the lat- 
ter part of their reigns, and it is all attributed to their 
defection from Jehovah (2 Chron. 16 : 7-12 ; 24 : 15-25). 
Some ethical evils are mentioned in both cases, but 
they are treated as minor matters compared with this 
one fact of breaking the personal bond with Jehovah. 

Attitude Towakds Bad Men 
We will find that the same principle holds good 
when we turn to the other side, to the history of indi- 
viduals of bad character. Even where calamities or 
punishments are recorded they are never merely for 
morally bad conduct, and never merely for punish- 
ment's sake. They are always for some personal of- 
fense against God's personal friendly bond with Israel, 
and wholly given as a means for strengthening that 
bond. 



GOD AND INDIVIDUALS 271 

The case of Pharaoh may be considered typical. 
The New Testament makes the remarkable statement 
that God raised up Pharaoh expressly for the sake of 
visiting that punishment upon him (Kom. 9 : 17). Of 
course then it could not have been punishment for pun- 
ishment's sake, and it could not have been moral sin 
that God led him into that he might be punished. It 
was merely that God so arranged and led that Pharaoh 
should come into violent opposition to the personal 
plans of favour He was carrying out for His friends 
Israel, and the woeful consequences which that must 
inevitably entail was a valuable object lesson that 
would stimulate the loyalty of His people Israel and 
lead them to closer friendly trust. 

More significant is the great number of cases where 
punishment was merited or even threatened and after- 
wards lightened or remitted. It begins with Cain, that 
first great criminal, whom God dealt with leniently 
and compassionately (Gen. 4: 9-15), or indeed with the 
first parents themselves, whose threatened punishment 
was lightened, with the promise of ultimate complete 
deliverance (Gen. 2 : 17 ; 3 : 1-19). And so all on down 
through the history, the attitude of God towards the 
bad man is not that of the impartial, inflexible judge, 
but on the other hand, as far as direct acts are con- 
cerned, He appears more often as mitigating some de- 
served punishment or ignoring offenses entirely and 
going right on in friendly help to the offending person. 

Jacob did a very disgraceful and wicked act in de- 
ceiving his father to obtain a formal blessing (Gen. 27), 
and although we see that by the nemesis of nature it 



272 THE SUPEKNATUKAL 

was the cause of great suffering to him, yet God in His 
personal activity as pictured in the narrative does not 
take any notice of it at all. He allowed the blessing 
which the deceived father had pronounced to stand 
good, and confirmed it by the miraculous vision of the 
ladder (Gen. 28 : 12-17). This would be intolerable in 
a moral ruler, but in the movement of the history God 
is not acting as moral ruler at all, but entirely in the 
attitude of friend and partisan, and it is the fit office 
of a friend to continue his friendship and help irrespec- 
tive of the character and acts of the one befriended. 

He was his friend because Jacob had desired that 
friendship, and had been at pains to get himself made 
the heir of a special regime of friendship which God 
from the time of Abraham was bestowing specially on 
a specific line of persons (Gen. 25 : 31-34). It was to 
emphasize the importance and absoluteness of that 
compact of friendship that God for its sake entirely 
overlooked the f aultiness of the man who had prized it 
and sought to have it. Instead of a blunder of the 
narrator this little incident really contains a miniature 
epitome of the gospel of salvation, namely, God be- 
friending the unworthy who trust in Him. 

God is not represented as making any hint of pun- 
ishment when the brothers acted so cruelly to Joseph 
and deceived their father (Gen. 27:18-35) or when 
Simeon and Levi murdered so many innocent men at 
Shechem (Gen. 24 : 25-28). The story of the Danites' 
perfidy is given without any hint of punishment (Judg. 
18 : 14-26). Eehoboam was saved from part of the 
disaster of his senseless tyranny for the sake of the 



GOD AND INDIVIDUALS 273 

friendship to David (1 Kings 11 : 32). Manasseh was 
very cruel as well as apostate, but just as soon as he 
repented of his apostasy and looked to God he was for- 
given and reinstated in favour (2 Chron. 33 : 12-13). 

The Old Testament Gospel 
Such and of such a nature is the story of God's deal- 
ings with men as recorded in the Old Testament. It 
is not the story of men slowly overcoming their faults 
and rising to higher levels of virtue. That is not what 
is portrayed nor what is intended. No more is it the 
story of a just and omniscient God watching over the 
conduct of men, punishing their sins and rewarding 
virtue. Sins are passed over in a way that would be 
inexplicable as the administration of a just moral ruler, 
and quite as often the virtuous and noble are allowed 
to meet with the severest trials. The intention must 
be to portray God in another light entirely. 

The whole picture of God in His dealings both with 
good men and bad is that of a great wise friend using 
every means to build up a relation of friendship. With 
the bad He is lenient, forgiving if there is any plausible 
pretext, and ever seeking by warning and kindness to 
win them to better things. With the good He meets 
and associates in a most beautiful relation of congenial 
fellowship, which makes us feel that He can be to us 
also the sympathetic friend and confidant our hearts 
long for. He does not hold Himself aloof from any 
because of character or culture. Even for the doubtful, 
the weak, the rough and uncultured He has a service and 
freely gives them His companionship and confidence. 



274 THE SUPERNATURAL 

The picture is not a different one from that of the 
Gospels but the same. It is the same God with the 
same heart of patience and forbearance, ever yearning 
over His wayward friends, warning, encouraging, coun- 
selling, calling them back to the shelter of His care. 

Really in some respects the Old Testament is a more 
practical gospel even than the New. The New Testa- 
ment presents the grace of God in ideal form and on 
very much higher levels. But the Old Testament pre- 
sents that same grace and kindness in homely operation 
among just the kind of dull, selfish, exasperating hu- 
manity that still makes up the great world of practical 
life. The New Testament is the Gospel of the King- 
dom of Heaven but the Old Testament is that same 
gospel as it practically works out in this sordid old 
world in which most of us are still living. 



PART III 
The Christ 



THE INCARNATION 

WE now come to what has always been con- 
sidered the most important part of the 
Bible, and unquestionably the center of our 
whole religious system. The New Testament gives a 
record of the life of Jesus. It records that after a life 
of something over thirty years He died on a cross, three 
days later rose alive from the grave, and soon ascended 
into heaven. It records that during the last three 
years of His life He went about the country preaching 
" The Kingdom of Heaven," healing the sick and doing 
other miraculous acts of kindness. It declares that 
this Jesus was a divine being, " The Son of God." 

What meaning are we to give to this great event ? 
How are we to coordinate it with all the rest that we 
have found in the Bible revelation of God ? Of course 
we are taking the record at its face value just as it 
comes to us, and are accepting every claim that it 
makes as to the character and acts of Jesus. 

It is one of the common mistakes of interpretation 
to try to confine the whole of a great event all to one 
formula. This event being such as it is represented to 
be is much too great to have only one meaning and one 
value. We may expect it to have many values and 
many meanings. And yet, while that is so, it is legiti- 

277 



278 THE SUPERNATURAL 

mate to try to find what is the one most fundamental 
meaning, and what was the central purpose that 
caused it. 

Its apparent meaning and value to us will vary ac- 
cording to the view-point from which we consider it. 
If we consider it from the view-point of our needs as 
sinners in a sin-cursed world we will call Jesus the 
Saviour, and consider His life and death a great sacri- 
fice by which He redeemed us from death and secured 
for us Eternal Life. 

This conception is unquestionably correct from that 
view-point. Jesus does save us from death and give 
us eternal life. He expected and intended to do so 
when He came into the world. To us that is a fact of 
immeasurable importance, and it is a fact that has the 
greatest efficiency in touching men's hearts and attract- 
ing them to Jesus. The Church is entirely right in 
making that the most conspicuous part of its great 
gospel appeal to the world. And we are right in 
making it the ground of supreme love and devotion to 
Jesus. 

Anything we may say here must not be construed as 
implying that Jesus is not a Saviour, or that our Chris- 
tianity is not to us a gospel of salvation from sin and 
death. But because that is the greatest value of the 
fact to us does not prove that it is necessarily the most 
important meaning of the fact itself intrinsically. 

Certainly that cannot be counted its primary motive. 
We need hardly pause to remind ourselves again how 
impossible it would be to justify any such object as that 
as the primary motive of a supernatural act by God. 



THE INCAKNATION 279 

We have repeatedly noted that it would be inconsistent 
with God's infinite competence in His original great act 
of creation to conceive that He had to later interfere 
by a supernatural interposition to secure some improve- 
ment not originally provided for. Much more would 
it be so if it was to repair some ruin that had developed 
or restore something that had gone astray. 

We must view this great fact in the light of all that 
went before it in that long working of this same God 
to which we give the name Evolution Process, and we 
must give it some interpretation and some purpose 
which is consistent with all the rest of that great proc- 
ess and an integral part of it. 

The Fact of the Incarnation 
From that point of view we must see that the most 
significant thing is the fact itself. The most important 
thing is the fact that God became man, that the infinite 
being who transcends our highest powers of thought 
placed Himself on the same plane and under the same 
limitations as one of the little creatures He had made. 
Not the Atonement but the Incarnation is the great 
pregnant fact which we must count as central. If we 
have gotten even a faint conception of the immeasurable 
greatness of God we will feel that this becoming man 
is such an exceedingly great fact as to overshadow 
everything else associated with it. The great fact of 
Christ is the Incarnation. 

One reason that we have not heretofore been suffi- 
ciently impressed with the surpassing greatness of this 
fact is because in the traditional theology we have been 



280 THE SUPERNATURAL 

so dazed by the majesty of its setting that we have 
attempted to interpret it in terms that really did not 
contain it. "We have said that the divine being merely 
took into union with Himself a human soul and body 
and caused it to go through the experiences of suffering 
and death that we saw in Jesus. This in itself would 
be an act of no great magnitude, and might be merely 
a minor item of the preparation for some greater work. 

More recently we have come to feel that this does 
not fill the conditions represented, and under various 
names and theories we have begun to insist that in 
some way the divine being Himself became the man, 
and that the soul of this man was none else than the 
divine being Himself. But the complacency which we 
have inherited from the older conception is still strong 
upon us, and the enormous significance of this new 
meaning is slow in coming to full realization in our 
feelings. 

Many men indeed, under the influence of the scien- 
tific conception of God's greatness, have been so im- 
pressed with that feature that they have felt unable to 
believe a real Incarnation, and so have challenged the 
divinity entirely. But the great body of Christians, 
while realizing that we must meet the problem of how 
it could be possible and what adequate and suitable 
reason there could be for such a fact, still insist that it 
did take place. If it did take place certainly it was an 
event of such immeasurable greatness that the fact it- 
self must be considered the matter of chief significance, 
and from that standpoint we must seek its interpreta- 
tion. 



THE INCARNATION 281 

Possibility of the Incaknation 
The problem of how such a thing as the Incarnation, 
God becoming man, could be possible, need give us no 
particular anxiety. While we can perhaps come no 
nearer solving it than we can any of the common 
problems of the genesis and growth of our own souls, 
yet it does not now present to our minds any of the 
contradictions that it seemed to present a generation 
ago. With the dogmatism of ignorance we used to 
make various rigid definitions of the nature of mind 
and soul, of such a character as to preclude the pos- 
sibility of much that is implied in the Incarnation. 
Now with more wisdom we have come to realize that 
we do not know nearly as much as we supposed in re- 
gard to that matter. 

Many recent discoveries and deductions in psychology 
have tended to very materially alter and expand our 
conceptions of the nature of soul or life and of what it 
can do. For instance, the familiar fact of ordinary 
generation, the soul or life of the child emanating from 
the soul or life of its parents, is really a fact which 
carries very radical implications as to the nature and 
possibilities of a soul. 

Or take another fact of the same general import. 
We find that though there is a life-consciousness 
common to our whole body yet every separate cell of 
our body has such an independent endowment of life 
that it can continue to live, grow and execute its 
ordinary functions when completely severed from the 
body. This it can do not only when grafted into some 
other body but even entirely separate and alone. 



282 THE SUPEKNATUKAL 

Even more suggestive is the well-known phenomenon 
of " Multiple Personality," where a single man has two 
or more distinct streams of thought, consciousness and 
volition, as independent of each other apparently as if 
it were two distinct persons that were doing the acting 
and thinking. 

These and other facts have seemed to demonstrate 
that soul or life is a very different kind of entity from 
what it was once supposed to be. Consciousness and 
personality are not the very essence of the soul, as they 
were formerly assumed to be. JSTot only can a single 
soul develop into various kinds of plurality, but the 
same soul or life is capable of simultaneously carrying 
on within itself two or more streams or syntheses of 
consciousness independent of each other. The soul is a 
great efficient something, and it has ability to carry on 
acts and to effect or experience consciousness, but 
neither the acts nor the consciousness are the essence 
of the soul itself. They are both alike merely func- 
tions, or things that it does. And the same soul may 
have going on at the same time two or more, not only 
of the streams of acts but of the streams of conscious- 
ness as well. 

Such facts as these have led us to see the danger of 
negative dogmatism. They have made us see that the 
nature of the soul or mind, and its capability may be 
something far greater and more versatile than we had 
supposed. They have made us feel that it may not be 
at all impossible for an infinite divine mind to function 
in a variety of different forms and different capacities, 
indeed in as many manners and forms as it may choose. 



THE INCARNATION 283 

For that is what we must consider that Incarnation 
would be. It would be the mind of God functioning 
within the limitations, capacities and experiences usual 
to an ordinary human mind. It does not mean chang- 
ing His substance and becoming composed of other 
substance. It does not necessarily mean His ceasing 
to be all that He was before or ceasing to carry on all 
the other functions that He was carrying on before. 
Nor would it mean His adding anything, as He cer- 
tainly had before all the capacities that a human mind 
has. 

"We need not profess to explain and define the method 
of the Incarnation, but we may entirely dismiss all 
thought of impossibility or contradictoriness in con- 
nection with it. Many things that we already know 
of the nature of mind point directly towards its possi- 
bility and there is nothing that really contradicts it. 
The fact itself we may perhaps define as follows: — 
The infinite being God not only inhabiting and oper- 
ating a physical body like that of a man but also with 
a consciousness located there feeling all the sensations 
and experiences that a man experiences, and thinking, 
perceiving, willing and acting with the same measure 
of capacity as an ordinary man possesses. All this of 
course with a feeling of perfect sympathy and brother- 
liness towards other men. 

This is what we may consider Jesus to have been, 
and this is what we may define Incarnation to mean. 
It must at least have been something the equivalent of 
that, for Jesus emphatically declared, " He that hath 
seen me hath seen the Father," and at the same time 



284 THE SUPEBNATUKAL 

He was always emphasizing the fact that He was " The 
Son of Man." 

PUEPOSE OF THE INCAENATION 

The next question is as to the reason for the Incar- 
nation. If God thus became a man why did He do it ? 
What place had such an act in His great perfect scheme 
of universe building ? What is its place in God's great 
evolution scheme? There is really the fundamental 
problem. That is the one crucial question in connec- 
tion with the Incarnation. We cannot conceive of 
God doing such an act without a sufficient reason, 
and what reason could be sufficient for such an act as 
that? 

We may say at once that the producing purpose was 
not the Atonement. It was not done primarily as a 
preparation for atoning for men's sins. That is not at 
all implying that the atonement is not true. It is not 
saying that atonement and sacrifice did not result as a 
necessary consequence of that incarnation. But that 
was not the formal and fundamental purpose of it. 
We cannot believe that such a purpose could produce 
such an act, or indeed any supernatural act. We have 
already a number of times considered this same ques- 
tion. We could not conceive of God doing a super- 
natural act primarily in order to restore anything or 
repair anything or to supply any need or deficiency in 
the results of ordinary evolution. 

The purpose of the Incarnation was precisely the 
same purpose as that of all the supernatural in the Old 
Testament. It was just a great act of fellowship. It 



THE INCAKNATION 285 

was merely God carrying out fully His purpose to 
engage in fellowship with men. It was really an act 
which belongs in the same series with all those Old 
Testament acts, merely the culmination and most per- 
fect one of all those acts, all having the same purpose 
and the same meaning. Its object and meaning was 
the complete inauguration of fellowship between God 
and men, a purpose which, as we have seen, seems to 
be the natural culmination of the whole evolution 
process. 

It is simply God doing in perfect degree what He 
had partially done in all the Old Testament super- 
natural, namely, meeting with men on the plane of 
perfect fellowship, thus fully inaugurating that new 
step in the evolution progress by inviting and drawing 
men into a state of fellowship with Himself. 

With such an interpretation the Incarnation becomes 
luminous with meaning. All the other things that 
result from it, such as the atonement, the teaching and 
the ethical example, fall naturally into their logical 
place, and all the difficulties with regard to it entirely 
disappear. It is the natural and fitting culmination of 
God's one great universe act. 

Its Place in the Evolution Scheme 
All down through the cycling ages God had been 
leisurely carrying on an enterprise of evolution by 
which He finally produced a race of beings capable of 
engaging in fellowship with Himself. With the dawn 
of Bible history He is seen beginning that fellowship 
with them. The Old Testament records the earlier, 



286 THE SUPEBNATUEAL 

tentative advances. There were occasionally at long 
intervals acts of (supernatural) kindness and friendli- 
ness to individuals and to one selected nation. Along 
with this there was also a continuous fellowship of con- 
versation with them through the prophets and inspired 
men. All this was a true intercourse of fellowship, 
though somewhat veiled and reserved. 

But we must believe that whatever God undertakes 
to do He will ultimately do in the most complete and 
effective degree possible. If He has proposed to bestow 
fellowship upon men we may expect that in due time 
He will bestow a fellowship that is the fullest and most 
complete kind possible. 

The fullest and most complete kind of fellowship He 
could bestow would be for Himself to become a man, 
stand on the same level side by side with other men, 
sharing all their experiences and giving them all the 
outflow of sympathy and friendship that perfect love 
could bestow. That would be the complete bestowal 
of perfect fellowship. 

That is precisely what in the person of Jesus Christ 
He did. And that purpose is one that gives us an en- 
tirely adequate and appropriate reason for the Incarna- 
tion. That is what we must believe the Incarnation 
and the life of Jesus Christ really mean. And therein 
we see that, instead of being abnormal, incredible and 
contrary to science, this Incarnation of God is some- 
thing that not only religion but the evolution process 
in its highest interpretation actually calls for, and evo- 
lution could not have its highest culmination with- 
out it. 



THE INCAKNATION 287 

Fellowship Always Specific and Limited 
If we are to interpret the incarnation of God in Jesus 
Christ entirely as an act of fellowship then we must 
expect that, like all the Old Testament acts of fellow- 
ship, it shall strictly conform to the rules and essential 
conditions of fellowship. One of these, as we have 
seen, is that fellowship is a personal thing and re- 
stricted in its bestowal to specific persons. It is not a 
general benevolence available to all that will take it, 
but must be specifically limited and bestowed on some 
definite individual or group. It might seem at first 
that in Jesus' case there was an exception to this, as 
we believe Him to be the Saviour of the world with no 
restrictions to His love and grace. 

That is certainly true of the results of His life, and 
it is true that He offers fellowship now to any one any- 
where who will come, — personally and individually, — 
and accept His fellowship. And yet when we consider 
the historical fact, the actual earthly life itself and the 
acts of Jesus, we find there is no exception there to the 
rule. It all conforms to this law of fellowship, pre- 
cisely as all the other fellowship acts of the Old Testa- 
ment did. 

Jesus' fellowship was not bestowed upon the world 
at large. It was distinctly restricted and was all actu- 
ally confined to one party, to the same party that had 
been the recipient of all the Old Testament fellowship, 
the party that God had established a special bond of 
pledged fellowship with. To the Syro-Phoenician 
woman Jesus said : — " I am not sent but unto the lost 
sheep of the house of Israel " (Matt. 15 : 24). We have 



288 THE SUPERNATURAL 

no right to think that Jesus did not know what He 
was saying or did not mean what He said. 

This saying which we have often made such strenu- 
ous efforts to explain away is really a very important 
and fundamental one. The principle here stated is 
confirmed by an examination of all His recorded life. 
He did confine His work and His fellowship to that 
nation, and never went out of it for work. Even when 
some Greeks, — men of another nation,— -came to Him in 
Jerusalem and wished to meet Him it required quite an 
amount of planning to get the audience, and it called 
out in Jesus some of His deepest reflections as being an 
unusual event (John 12 : 20 ff.). 

He loved all people in all the world, and desired to 
have fellowship with them all every one. And this in- 
carnate life and fellowship He was now giving He 
hoped would eventually bring men from all nations to 
seek and accept that fellowship. But the life and the 
acts themselves, if they were to be real fellowship and 
not merely benevolence and charity, must be given to 
those with whom there was a distinct bond of relation 
and fellowship, namely, this Jewish nation. 

It was when He should be " lifted up " and this act 
of fellowship closed, that all men should be drawn to 
Him, and of course none that come to Him would ever 
be turned away. He would open up a relation of 
friendship and fellowship with each and every one of 
those that sought it,— personally and one by one. But 
that is an entirely different matter from this act in 
which He had "come down" and on His own part 
from His own side unasked, bestowed fellowship. In 



THE INCABNATION 289 

that case He bestowed only upon a people to whom He 
had long sustained a relation of plighted friendship, a 
relation that distinctly justified and called for the be- 
stowal of friendly fellowship. 

It was because this coming of Jesus as a supernatural 
act was under the same restrictions and conditions in 
this respect as all the other supernatural acts that it 
also was limited to this group with whom God was 
carrying on the relation of fellowship, namely, Israel, 
and was not directed in general to any and every na- 
tion, though the results of His coming, as indeed the 
results of all the other Old Testament supernatural 
acts, were eventually to benefit all the world. 

The Personality of Jesus 
If the meaning we are to see in Jesus is a revelation 
of God, and the object is fellowship, then the most im- 
portant thing in the Gospels is not the sermon on the 
mount or the great theological discourses in John. 
The most important thing in the Gospels is Jesus Him- 
self. We read the Gospels not to know what Jesus 
taught but to know Jesus. Far more important than 
anything He said or did is the sight of Him saying and 
doing, and the touch of the divine heart that lay be- 
hind the words and deeds. It is the personality rather 
than the product that is important. 

Not doctrines about His person but to really know 
Him as a person, not analysis of His character but 
really to come into contact with Him as friend with 
friend and let that character have its influence upon 
us, that is the way we really get the intended benefit 



290 THE SUPERNATURAL 

of the Gospels. The art critic who should critically 
examine the canvas, learn the chemical composition of 
all the colours and the mathematical dimensions of all 
the lines and shapes, but fail to see that it is a picture 
and be touched by its beauty, has not gotten the highest 
value out of his subject. 

To really come into touch with Jesus and get the 
full influence that the gospel picture was intended to 
afford, we must put out of mind all the psychological 
problems about infinite God becoming man, and the 
theological problems of His nature. We must forget 
for the time all about Atonement, and not even let the 
consciousness of His divinity obtrude too much into 
our thoughts. We must look upon Him purely as a 
man. For that was what the whole event was, namely, 
God becoming man, and if we fail to feel Him abso- 
lutely a man we fail of the very object God was at 
such infinite pains to secure. If it was worth God's 
while to take all the pains to become a man, surely it 
is worth our while frankly and fully to consider Him 
a man and meet with Him as a man. 

In all His relations He was genuinely a man. He 
lived His life not in any official capacity, except as 
every man's heart and the Spirit of God in him will 
mark out a beckoning path of service. Even after He 
began His public work it was the heart of the honest 
carpenter that still beat within Him and that went out 
in understanding sympathy to all with whom He 
mingled. 

His most intimate disciples seem all to have been 
from the labouring classes, though doubtless many just 



THE INCAKISTATION 291 

as sincere and earnest could have been obtained from 
more educated circles, and one such man, Paul, did 
have to be found later outside the twelve to be the 
doctrinal interpreter of the new faith. Various 
reasons have been suggested for this, but we seem 
usually to entirely overlook the most obvious reason, 
namely, that Jesus Himself was a labouring man. Men 
of that class would naturally be more congenial to Him 
and He to them. We must not suppose that the tastes 
and feelings that rule other men were absent from Him. 
As well suppose that He was not man at all as to sup- 
pose that in any essential respect He was not the same 
kind of man that any other man in His circumstances 
would have been. 

The Model Feiend 

There are a number of things in the record which 
are very difficult to account for on any other theory of 
the meaning of Christ's coming which are not only 
easily explainable but very instructive as well if we 
realize that the whole movement was a matter of 
offered friendship and fellowship by God to men. 

One of these difficult things is Judas. His relations 
to Judas cannot be accounted for as merely a mistake 
growdng out of the human limitations of Jesus. Jesus 
never was mistaken in the character of Judas. "We are 
plainly told that He read his character from the be- 
ginning (John 6 : 64). His defection was not a sudden 
emotional break merely, for he had long been dishonest 
(John 12:6). To imagine that Jesus distinctly chose 
him for the purpose of having one of His disciples be- 



292 THE SUPEENATUEAL 

tray Him, in order to fulfill prophecy or something of 
that kind, would be to make the whole matter too 
much like merely a melodramatic suicide. 

Jesus chose Judas on the same ground that He chose 
all the others, namely, that he eagerly responded to His 
appeal for friendship by trust. That was the one thing 
He preeminently wanted. True his was not fully the 
kind of trust He wanted, nor was that of any of the 
others at first. ISTone of them had at first either the 
character or the beliefs He wished them to have, and 
it is quite possible that Judas averaged up fairly well 
with the others in that respect. 

The important thing is that the whole matter was 
on the plane of friendship and governed by the rules 
that apply to friendship. He expected to eventually 
win the world not chiefly by logic or learning but by 
the drawing power of friendship and sympathy. And 
so friendship was the one criterion by which He chose 
His disciples, those who were to be His representatives 
and carry on the work after He was gone. 

Having once given His friendship the bond could only 
be broken by the other party. He would never with- 
draw it once given. The record is that " Having loved 
... He loved unto the end " (John 13 : 1), Judas 
being implicitly included. "Whether or not He still 
had hope of being able to reform Judas, at any rate He 
was too much of a man of honour and too true a friend 
to withdraw for any cause a pledged friendship once 
given. And the same thing is equally true to-day. 
The only thing that will ever put any man outside the 
circle of Jesus' friends is for him himself to break or 



THE INCAKNATION 293 

repudiate the bond of friendship. Jesus will never do 
it no matter how great the provocation. There is as 
great a lesson in Judas as in " the thief on the cross." 

There are many indications that all the disciples 
were rather heart friends than critically selected ap- 
prentices. They were all merely men of His own 
class and social level, who, partly for that reason, had 
made a whole-hearted response to the appeal of His 
friendship. That was the one thing He wanted, and 
He was willing to rest His cause on that rather than 
on scholarship, eloquence or political power. 

He apparently aimed to influence His disciples rather 
by His personality than by His words, otherwise how 
can we account for it that not till they had been with 
Him more than a year did they come to the full realiza- 
tion of His divinity (Matt. 16 : 13 fi\), a truth that He 
was much rejoiced to have them feel and which He 
surely could have fully proved to them inside of a week 
by teaching if it had been His plan to do it that way. 
As it was He said it came to them through the heart, 
directly through contact with the divine spirit. 

The whole picture is the picture of a friend bestow- 
ing the riches of His divinely precious fellowship upon 
a chosen circle of friends, that they might go out to 
the world with the glow of that friendship upon them, 
to thereby attract others into the circle of the same 
precious fellowship. That is the way His cause has 
always won its converts and the way it is winning 
them to-day, — by the touch of Christ-filled lives rather 
than by the pressure of logic and scientific " Christian 
evidences." 



294 THE SUPERNATURAL 

Not that His words are not a rich storehouse of 
profitable teaching. Of course there were wise say- 
ings, profitable advice and deep theological truths 
given in His conversations with His disciples and 
others. He would not be a true friend if He did not, 
since He could, put much profitable conversation into 
His fellowship with them. He could not otherwise 
have given them that full outflow of His heart which 
fellowship implies. He was purer and more spiritual 
than other men, and the stores of profitable truth were 
there and must come out if He spoke at all. 

But if He was speaking just for the sake of revealing 
truths how can we account for it that He never com- 
mitted a single truth He had revealed to permanent 
written record, and made no provision for having it 
done ? Nor was there any attempt made apparently to 
put on record a single word that He had spoken for 
many years after He had gone away. 

More than that, though for three years He was con- 
stantly busy teaching, preaching and talking to people, 
and probably if all He spoke were written it would be 
enough to fill hundreds of volumes, yet of all His 
divine words we have left preserved to us less all told 
than could be easily spoken in three or four hours' 
time. 

This is all quite unaccountable except on the one 
principle that it was not the intrinsic value of the 
truths taught that was the important thing so much 
as the social touch with Him the speaker. His words 
and speaking were of value chiefly as means to 
reveal Him Himself. 



THE INCABNATION 295 

Dislike foe Publicity 

Another very strange fact is His command to His 
disciples not to tell the people that He was the expected 
Christ (Matt. 16 : 20). If He was the expected Christ, 
and the success of His mission depended on His being 
accepted as such, why does He forbid His disciples to 
frankly tell the people that He is so? What expla- 
nation can we give of this except that He considered the 
influence of His personality at that stage far more 
important than right beliefs as to the nature of His 
person? And He knew that the agitation of their 
thoughts over the knowledge of who He was would 
interfere with their receiving the quiet, deep influences 
of His personality. To try to look at the sun blinds 
our eyes. We get the most benefit by just letting its 
light shine about us. 

When the Pharisees asked Him to show them a sign 
from heaven and they would believe His claims to be 
the Messiah (Mark 8:11, 12; John 6:20, etc.), He 
refused. Why did He refuse ? The working of 
miracles was an every-day occurrence with Him. Why 
not work one now? It is quite possible that they 
would have been as good as their word and have 
formally acknowledged Him as the Messiah if He had 
complied with their test and done a suitable miracle. 
Why does He refuse such a natural test when the 
working of miracles was such a constant part of His 
every-day work ? 

Equally strange is another similar fact, His constant 
reluctance to display His miracles and frequent direct 
attempts to conceal them. He frequently commands 






296 THE SUPEBNATUKAL 

the person healed not to tell any one of his healing 
(cf. Matt. 8 : 4, etc.). He leads or sends others away 
in order that the healing may be in private and 
away from the public observation (Mark 8 : 23 ; John. 
9 : 7, etc.). Why did He do so ? 

He Himself recognizes and appeals to His miracles 
as affording proof of His divinity (John 10 : 38 ; 14 : 11, 
etc.), and yet He all the time seems to wish to hide 
them and keep them private, as though they were a 
burden and He wished He did not have to be discom- 
moded by them. 

We have been accustomed to say it was because the 
success of His miracles increased the envy of His 
enemies and hastened His death, and He wished to 
prolong His time for teaching. But this is hardly a 
sufficient or a satisfactory answer. 

The true reason was that He had come from heaven 
and become man expressly that He might meet men in 
fellowship on their own level, and He grudged every- 
thing that tended to make Him seem different from 
them. He had such a heart of sympathy that He could 
not help healing suffering men whenever they appealed 
to Him, but He constantly felt the price He had to pay 
in that condition of special ness which it raised up as a 
barrier between Him and the hearts of those with whom 
He met and whom He wished to touch as brothers. 

He wanted not the wonder and admiration of men 
but their confiding affection. He wanted the same 
feeling they had for the human friend that was most 
near to them. Everything that made Him seem dif- 
ferent from other men by just so much made more 



THE INCAKNATION 297 

difficult that relation of familiar, homely affection. He 
could have inspired wonder and admiration as God in 
heaven, and did so in Old Testament times. The other 
— the homely affection, — He considered so important 
that it was worth leaving heaven and becoming man to 
obtain it. 

The mediaeval Church entirely missed this truth. 
They fixed their gaze so constantly on the divinity as 
to miss entirely the feeling of this humanity He con- 
sidered so important, and as a result had to bring in the 
virgin mother and the saints to supply this void their 
mistake had made. We even yet have not entirely 
recovered from that mistake. We are accustomed to 
think of Jesus' ministry as consisting of only the three 
years of His itinerancy. Future generations may come ^ 
to know Him more fully as He wished to be known. 
They may realize what He became man for, and to 
them His thirty years in the Nazareth carpenter shop 
may bring quite as much soul comfort and strength as 
the three years of His harassed publicity. 

Jesus' Miracles 

The Incarnation itself is the supreme miracle, but 
the life of Jesus also presents many cases of specific 
miracles. Indeed so great is their number that they 
dominate the story, and we have very little account of 
the acts of Jesus that do not have something of the 
miraculous about them. 

If the great miracle of the Incarnation is true we 
need not stop to justify the occurrence of these specific 
miracles. Accepting them as they are recorded we 



298 THE SUPERNATURAL 

shall only ask, What is their meaning ? What is their 
purpose ? What is their value ? 

Yarious answers are given. They are the proof of 
the divinity of Christ. They are to attest the truth of 
the doctrines He taught and the salvation He promised. 
They are to give us confidence to trust Him by seeing 
His power and what He did. All of these answers 
and others may be true without yet being the true 
answer as to what the meaning of the miracles is. 

To get the true answer we must consider two or three 
separate aspects. We must consider not only what good 
resulted from them. That is one meaning. Another 
question is, What was God's purpose in them ? Still an- 
other is, What was their genesis in the mind of Christ ? 

These last two questions are not the same. Jesus 
was a man and thought and wished as a man. To Jesus 
His miracles were a burden because they interfered 
with the great passion and pleasure of His life, which 
was to get near to men and feel their familiar affection. 
God's Spirit saw a value in their occurrence that out- 
weighed the disadvantages they brought in this respect, 
so God allowed that they should be done. And yet the 
cause in Jesus' mind that brought them about was not this 
wider advantage they would bring but something else. 

The cause that produced them practically every one 
was pure human sympathy. It was the passion to help 
men and relieve their sufferings. Jesus fully realized 
the purpose which in God's plan the miracles served. 
He knew they really did prove His divinity and attest 
His authority. " Believe the works that ye may know 
that the Father is in me " (John 10 : 38). " The works 



THE mCAKNATION 299 

that I do bear witness that the Father hath sent me " 
(John 5 : 36). Once in the very act of doing the mira- 
cle He called attention to its evidential value. " That 
ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth 
to forgive sins . . . arise and go unto thy house " 
(Matt. 9 : 6). But even so that was not the primary 
purpose that prompted His miracles. Neither in this 
one nor in any of the others was the cause that led 
Him to do the miracle its teaching or evidential value. 
"We know this because He positively refused to do a 
miracle for a sign. 

The motive that prompted Him was pure sympathy 
responding to the appeals of distress. It is the same 
motive that prompts the mother to give help in response 
to the moans of her sick babe. To give the help does 
prove that she has mother love, and that she is good 
and kind. But she does not do it for that purpose, — to 
evidence those things. If she did do it intentionally 
to evidence those things that fact would seriously im- 
pair its value as evidence of those very things. If you 
do a kind deed purposely to show that you are kind it 
does not show that you are kind at all, — merely that 
you are vain. So all Jesus' miracles were purely the 
result of His human sympathy responding to the appeal 
of distress and of trust, — an appeal that He never found 
Himself able to resist. And it is because they were so 
that they have such evidential value. 

The Mieacles Peoof of Jesus' Humanity 
It has always been considered that the miracles of 
Jesus prove His divinity. But if we will think more 



300 THE SUPEBNATUKAL 

deeply we will see that much more do they prove His 
humanity. 

We have seen that all the miracles of Jesus were 
merely the natural result of His sympathy on seeing 
suffering and need. He saw a suffering sick man, His 
sympathy was touched and His kind heart responded 
with the impulse to do all He could to help him. Hav- 
ing the power of God at His disposal He could, so He 
did, entirely heal such persons. 

But if, as we believe, Jesus is really God, one with 
the Father and the expression of His character, God's 
heart must be the same as the heart of Jesus. God the 
Father must feel the same sympathy for that suffering 
one and the same desire to relieve and heal him as Jesus 
did. "Why then does He not do it ? God sees now the 
millions of suffering men all over the world. He has 
the same sympathy and same strong desire to relieve 
them that we saw in Jesus. Why then does He allow 
them to go on in suffering instead of performing a 
miracle and healing them as Jesus did ? 

The reason is because with His infinite view of all 
the universe and of all time He can see decisive reasons 
why it is best for nature to have its way and the suf- 
fering run its normal course. Jesus did not have that 
wide view and that knowledge. In all the view that 
was open to His consciousness there was only the ap- 
peal and pity urging Him to help and nothing to offset 
it. And so He always did heal when the appeal 
came. 

It was that which made the difference. The heart 
was the same in both, and there was the same purpose 



THE INCARNATION 301 

to do the best in view of all the facts in sight. And 
yet when He and the Father both looked at the same 
suffering, and both had the same pity and the same 
strong desire to give relief, Jesus does heal and the 
Father does not. And the reason is because Jesus is 
human, bound only by the laws of human responsibili- 
ties and seeing only with the measure of human 
knowledge, while the Father must see and act from the 
view-point of the whole universe and eternity. 

If we wish for a definition then we may say that the 
miracles of Jesus are the product of divine power placed 
at the disposal of human knowledge and human inter- 
ests. They show us how God would act if He saw 
things as we see them. They are therefore the best pos- 
sible revelation to us of the heart of God, for they 
show us His heart not engaged with the problems of 
infinity and eternity, which would be entirely unintel- 
ligible to us, but show us His heart as it would be in 
our environment and facing our problems, so doing 
things we can understand. 

It is quite appropriate then that the recorded life of 
Jesus should be found so full of miraculous acts. Those 
very miracles are the proof, as they are the result, of 
His true humanity. But more than that, they reveal 
to us the heart of God as nothing else could reveal it, 
and enable us to understand it and feel it as no other 
way of revealing it could do. They are therefore just 
the acts best adapted to make us really know God and 
thus make us desire to come into fellowship with Him. 
And that was the supreme purpose Jesus had in be- 
coming man. 



n 

ATONEMENT 

THEKE remains still one more very interesting 
problem. Under that conception of religion 
and of Christ's mission which we are follow 
ing here what shall we say about what is usually called 
" Atonement " ? What was Christ's relation to the sins 
of the world ? 

If God assumes the personality of a man and stands 
among us sharing all the ordinary experiences of life, 
He must in that capacity come in contact with sin. In 
that case what must be His attitude towards it ? In 
what relation will He stand to the sinful men on ac- 
count of it, or what will be the results of His coming 
in contact with it in that capacity ? 

We may say at once that He will not in that capac- 
ity meet sin as judge to inflict punishment upon it. 
True this person who is incarnate is God and is the 
same being that was the creator and is the moral ruler 
of the world. Moreover it is distinctly declared that 
He is the same one who in the end shall pronounce 
judgment upon all men. But we are considering now 
this one specific enterprise or project for which He has 
come into the world. In this specific enterprise for 
which He became incarnate He does not meet sin and 
the sinner as judge at all (John 5 : 45 ; 8 : 15). That 
belongs to another enterprise and another department 

302 



ATONEMENT 303 

of His activity entirely. As incarnate and come for 
fellowship God's attitude will not be that of the pun- 
isher of sin. 

And we may also say that His primary aim and pur- 
pose will not be the task of freeing us from the pollu- 
tion of sin and giving us power to overcome it, even 
though most important help does come to us from Him 
in that respect. That, as we have seen, is right in line 
with the very essence of God's evolution process which 
He is carrying on in nature, so it could not be the pri- 
mary purpose in this special personal enterprise. 

His purpose in becoming incarnate did not have any 
relation to sin in any way primarily. It did have 
practically most vital and important relation to sin, 
but it was all as a secondary matter and an indirect 
result. 

Love His Supreme Motive 

His one fundamental purpose in all the incarnate life 
was fellowship, and all His attitudes and relations must 
have been such as would grow out of that. The ruling 
motive of all His incarnate life must have been that 
which is the characteristic exercise of fellowship, 
namely, kindness, friendship and love. 

By love we mean real human affection, — all that the 
warmest friendship between close friends is. Not some 
austere and exalted religious emotion, but this very 
human and very commonplace thing, affectionate friend- 
ship. 

Too often we look to everything else but that for the 
motive of His life. We see a prophet revealing the 
thoughts of God. We see a great perfect example. 



304 THE SUPERNATURAL 

We see the spirit of a martyr willing to die to fulfill 
a great trust laid upon Him. 

He did indeed do and feel all those things, but they 
were all quite secondary to the one great motive of His 
life, which was love, — the common kind of love, — the 
thing that makes our friends dear to us. 

If love was the supreme passion and motive of His 
life His attitude towards sin must be conditioned by 
that. His relation to sin and to the sinner must be 
that which is appropriate to love and that which 
would be produced by love. If His one purpose in 
coming was to be a great friend to man we can expect 
Him to do anything that is the proper province of 
friendship, — everything that love implies. 

Love in contact with sinful men would want to do 
everything it could to make them better. It would 
warn, teach, persuade them and try to set such an ex- 
ample before them as would spontaneously lead them 
to right living, and it would want to give them direct 
help by the power of God's Spirit in their hearts, to 
achieve the better life. And so we see that Jesus would 
become the great Teacher, as He has always been con- 
ceived to be, and the great example inspiring men to 
higher things. And we see also that special help to up- 
lift, rescue or reform him, might ordinarily be expected 
to be received by any man, along with other good gifts, 
when he entered into the fellowship of that love. 

Love Begets Suffekhstg 
But there is one other attitude that a friend may 
have towards his sinful friend. There is one other 



ATONEMENT 305 

thing that he may do, indeed that he must do and can- 
not avoid doing if he is really a friend. There is some- 
thing that is commonly overlooked as an office of 
friendship, but in this case it is the most important 
of all, and the key to the whole situation. He may 
suffer for the sins of his friend. Indeed in as far as 
he is truly a friend he cannot avoid so suffering. 

Not only when the sin and offense is against himself 
will he suffer directly from the offense itself. That is 
not all. In all cases he suffers. He suffers pain and 
shame for the unworthiness of his friend. But still 
more significant, he suffers directly through sympathy 
with his friend the evil and shame which the sin brings 
upon that friend. 

Love may be defined from various view-points, but 
from one view-point it certainly has this meaning of 
" sympathy " or " feeling with " the person loved. If 
you love a person very much you will feel the thrill 
of any joy and the pain of any suffering you see him 
experiencing, almost or quite as much as though you 
were experiencing it yourself. 

This then is a natural and inevitable attitude of 
friendship towards the sins of a friend. By virtue of 
his friendship he suffers for those sins, for it is the very 
essence of friendship and love to make him suffer on 
account of them. 

It is this that forms the true essence of what we call 
the Atonement. In a far more true and literal sense 
than even the older theology conceived, Christ did 
really bear the sins of men and really suffer for those 
sins. ^ 



306 THE SUPERNATURAL 

It was not merely in some mysterious "forensic" 
sense, — some technical legal relation. Christ had the 
iniquity of men laid upon Him and endured the penalty 
of that sin in the most literal sense, and moreover in a 
way that we are very familiar with in our own lives. 
He could not fail to do so if love was the passion of 
His life, and if love meant the same with Him as it 
j does with us. A perfect love coupled with a perfect 
knowledge would feel the penalty of the other man's 
sins just as much as the man himself did. Indeed 
would feel it far more, for He would know far better 
than the man himself the shamefulness of his sins and 
the ruin it was working both in the world and in his 
own soul. 

One of the serious mistakes of that older theology 
was its teaching of " The Impassibility of God," — that 
it was impossible for Him to suffer, that His existence 
was always and altogether wrapped in the most perfect 
and placid felicity. On the contrary we might almost 
say that God is the greatest sufferer in the universe, — 
that He suffers as much as all the universe together. 
For wherever there is suffering experienced by any one 
His perfect heart of love feels it just as much as the 
person concerned. 

This does not of course mean that God is crippled 
and crushed under an agony of pain. God's infinite 
powers are so great that all that vast amount of suf- 
fering may be comparatively only like one atom in the 
immensity of His infinite life. Nevertheless He does 
bear and feel it all. And one of the effects of Christ 
coming to earth incarnate was to let us see how much 



ATONEMENT 307 

He feels it, — let us see how great it is, by letting us see 
its effect upon Him when He was not thus sustained 
by infinite power. We shall see that it was this suffer- 
ing for the sins of men and not the nails of the cross 
that was really the actual cause of Christ's death. 

The Atonement thus is something that necessarily 
results from God's relation of love and fellowship with 
men. It is a natural and inevitable result of that fel- 
lowship. It is the essential attitude of God's love. 
He had before that same love and that same feeling, 
but the Incarnation by exhibiting the life of God in 
human proportions enables us for the first time to 
recognize and see it clearly. 

That suffering from men's sins is not merely a de- 
tached act, not merely a program that Jesus went 
through. It is simply His nature, — God's nature, — ex- 
pressing itself, and it appears somewhat wherever God 
appears personally and specially to men. It is more or 
less the undertone of all the Old Testament revelation 
of God. The story of the Atonement is not something 
exclusively confined to the closing chapters of the four 
Gospels. Atonement, pain, suffering over the sins of 
men He loves, colours the whole picture of God in all 
the Bible, Old Testament as well as New. 

Atonement 
"We need not attempt here to show what meaning 
this fact of Christ's suffering thus would have in the 
moral government of the world, and how it might con- 
tribute to make it possible that God could pass over 
sins without punishing them, as though they had been 



308 THE SUPEKNATUKAL 

expiated. That is a matter rather for Systematic The- 
ology. Still we may notice that our forgiveness could 
not have come without the suffering, for the fellowship 
and love which brings us forgiveness was the condition 
which caused that suffering and death. That was the 
price He had to pay if we were to be loved and for- 
given. He could not love us and receive us as friends 
without that suffering. In that sense we may say He 
had to die if we were to come into fellowship with 
Him and He with us, and thus we could say that His 
death purchased our redemption from punishment and 
death. 

He really made His life a sacrifice for sin (Isa. 
53 : 10), for it was sin, the sins of men, that crushed 
out that life and caused His death. Not merely that 
Pilate and the Jews in their wickedness nailed Him to 
the cross and killed Him. That has come to seem in 
these days altogether too artificial and far fetched a 
ground for a world salvation. It was not the soldiers' 
hammer and nails that wrought the miracle of the re- 
demption of the world. 

Pare six hours on the cross was not enough in itself 
to cause His death, as Pilate by his wonder testifies 
(Mark 15:44). Especially is that plain when we con- 
sider all the particulars. Something else aside from 
the nail wounds was a factor and a main factor in 
bringing the end, as has always been recognized. We 
know that mental suffering can produce death, and all 
the recorded circumstances seem to indicate that He 
died from some form of acute mental agony rather 
than the physical wounds. The intense agony in Geth- 



ATONEMENT 309 

semane also proves that there was something else at 
work besides the mere bodily wounds. 

Love Pkoduced His Death 
"We need not be at a loss to divine what that some- 
thing was. "We know of this pain and suffering ' 
through sympathy over men's sins which was pressing 
upon Him all the time, of such intensity that the only 
wonder is that it had not taken His life long before. 
Doubtless it would have done so but for the divine help 
and strength acquired during many long night vigils of 
prayer alone on the mountains. ^— 

It was His love, so great as to make Him feel the 
pangs of all our pains and sins which made the burden 
that ceaselessly pressed upon Him, and which won Him 
the title of the " Man of Sorrows." We may not be 
able to enter fully into the psychology of His experi- 
ences, and know just how far during His life He could 
see the sins of men and feel their pains. Doubtless He 
could only see with a man's capacity and feel in pro- 
portion. Human strength could not have endured the 
load a single moment if His love had been able to see 
the sins of all the world and fully feel its pain. He 
saw as a man the griefs and sins of all the men around 
Him that He knew and loved, and that was a sufficient 
load for Him to bear then. As He advanced in His min- 
istry, came in contact with more men, and especially as 
He saw more clearly their wickedness and felt the pang 
of it, the sorrow deepened more and more upon Him. , 
Something at the end made a sudden access of that 
pain too great for the measure of human strength to 



310 THE SUPERNATURAL 

bear, and it crushed out His life. It may have been 
that just at the end His mind was somehow miracu- 
lously opened to know and feel the sins of all men, 
with its terrible weight of pain and shame. But we 
are not shut up necessarily to such an explanation. 
The natural circumstances would seem to be quite suf- 
ficient. That terrible saturnalia of sin and blasphemy 
through which He was dragged just at the end would 
seem to furnish a sufficient cause. Especially since we 
know that He had a deep and tender love for each one 
even of those men that were so raving in blasphemy 
and hate. 

It is hard for us to realize that He could have really 
loved all those men who were hounding Him to death, 
— loved them so deeply that He felt their sin and 
shame as though it were His own. Yet we know that 
He did thus love them and must have suffered intensely 
from it all. What would a father feel to see his one 
dearly loved son so debase and debauch himself ? Mul- 
tiply that pain by the hundreds that Jesus saw thus 
debauching themselves, and remember that His love 
was far deeper and more constant than even that of a 
father for an erring boy. All this in addition to the 
ever-increasing load of the same kind that He was al- 
ready bearing, and is it any wonder that the strain be- 
came too great and His life gave way ? 

That intense agony in the garden the night before, — 
it was the anticipation of this that caused that agony, 
not the fear of death or physical wounds. What to 
Him was the little suffering of the nails in His flesh 
compared to this suffering of love ? 



ATONEMENT 311 

Bat the pain became too great for human strength 
to bear. He bowed His head upon the cross and 
yielded up His life. Sin had done its worst but His 
love remained constant. And His Father glorified 
Him and endued Him again with His divine strength. 

That is the real meaning of Jesus, the Son of God 
come down to earth to enter our fellowship and win us 
to be His friends. He has not finished a task and gone 
away. It was not a task but a fellowship. And 
though unseen He is still as truly now as then, " with 
us always." 

He has just the same love and sympathy now as 
then, only now He has infinite power to sustain the 
load. He has still the same desire to bestow love and 
fellowship that brought Him here at first, and the same 
heart yearning for us to come unto Him that He may 
love us and help us and be our friend. 

Let us not stop to question what it is that saves us 
from punishment and brings forgiveness of sins. Let 
us just look upon Him as He is, feeling the hurt and 
shame of all our sins, because He loves us, yet loving 
us still with all our sins, and holding out His hands to 
us in love, saying " Come Unto Me." 



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